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A Sound Server For X
An anonymous reader writes "X.org, the organization that governs the evolution of the X11R6 specifications, has released a sound server for X, called MAS. According to their site: 'MAS integrates with a compatible X11 server on your desktop. It processes graphic information locally, alleviating the need for network transmission of uncompressed graphical content. Graphic events are easily synchronized with audio events for professional-quality multimedia and accessibility-enabled applications.'" The X.org site describes MAS as an "affiliated technology" rather than "official," but it is released under the same license. "MAS" stands for "Media Application Server," and it's developed by Shiman Associates.
There are already a bunch of remote sound servers. I happen to like rplay, but there is also artsd, nas, esd, etc... Was the problem simply NIH syndrome?
From all the experience I've had with X applications, a sound server is the first thing that they need.
I've used a lot of X apps that have crashed due to bad requests (especially those dealing with unsupported colourmaps), and it makes sense that someone would shore up the current state of the code and work on stability. But why has it taken so long?
At any rate, this is a good step forward--hopefully we'll see more X-based apps improved as to stability and speed (X isn't the speediest thing in the world).
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Lots of neat applications, actually. One of my favorites is a network monitoring room... For instance: network monitoring apps sample your network traffic once a second... while bandwidth and processor utilization of your servers is within preset values, an audio file of a creek is played over your X-enabled speaker system. When congestion occurs, you here a new audio file played (which is, of course, mixed into the original creek audio-file) of a herd of cows drinking water, or something... When a router or server goes down, an alarm is triggered, and a flock of crows start caw-ing; or an elephant trumpets, or whatever...
The point is, when everything is going fine, the audio environment of your network control room sounds like a peacefull woodland setting, or something. When something goes wrong, you hear the animals going crazy. It's a really, really great way to monitor a large network, without being glued to a network monitor all the time.
Typically, an X-server would alert you to each of these above mentioned alerts and statistics by displaying a video-file of some sort, which is displayed on your video monitor (CRT, LCD). With an X-sound-server, you can pipe the same alerts and statistics to audio-files which are 'displayed' on your sound monitors (speakers).
If XMMS is using that much, then it is seriously broken. Admittedly, X *can* use a lot of bandwidth, but the onus for this is almost entirely on the application (toolkit) developer. Gtk+ and QT used to be really bad at this, but have since improved dramatically. Even so, there are a lot of variables to consider and using a light-weight theme in your respective toolkit can make a large impact on network performance.
When I work from home, I do so *entirely* out of an ssh-forwarded X connection, including, but not limited to, multiple XEmacs sessions, terminals and occasionally a remote Mozilla. The *only* problems I have encountered involved XEmacs doing silly things with the cut-buffer and pausing momentarily.
I am, admittedly, not an expert on the X11 wire protocol, but from what I have read from those who are, it is not inherently bandwidth heavy, but any protocol can be abused.
Additionally, sound is surprisingly light on a LAN. Doing some tests with K12LTSP esd integration Eric Harrison discovered that streaming audio frequently takes up less bandwidth than moving a window in "opaque" mode (contents continually updated)
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
The last big push from the Open Group was Broadway, which was an X protocol based plugin for web browsers. Look at how popular it is today! Their XPrint work is just as successful.
I got excited when I read the word "synchronized"
thinking this might be a mixer with SMPTE timecode capabilities. One of the most important distinctions between "pro" A/V and "consumer" A/V is whether the tracks have a standard sync encoding. Without that, the best you can hope for is "close", and that is not acceptable for broadcast or production.
This requirement is serious enough that pro gear has an input for a real hardware clock.
Sync capabilities and clock controlled sampling are a few of the keys to us having pro audio production on inexpensive hardware. Unfortunately, the barriers to entry remain outrageously high.
For most PC users, the sound card is strictly an output device. few will spend more than $100.00 on it, and even fewer will have audio tracks for which the bitrate or noise floor of these cards is a limiting factor. We tend to regard the sound card as a device for playing back audio that is at most, 44.1Khz, and at the deepest, 16 bit.
For the rest, the sound card is an input device. As such, it theoretically could be as good an input device as that found on a $100,000 audio workstation, and there isn't really a good reason why we CAN'T make the poor-man's DAW if we use one of the better sound cards as a starting point.
A timecoded 24-bit audio track which has not been resampled for the finished output is a minimum for "professional" work, and we *almost* have it on consumer gear! Everything except real timecode.
I place this problem in the same category as the absense of colorspace management on The Gimp. Those who understand what it is, realize that it makes the difference of whether they can use it professionally; those who do not understand, don't care, and don't realize the magnitude of the problem.
Slightly offtopic, but I figured I might as well take a shot- Has anyone successfuly piped audio from a Unix machine to a windows machine, across the network? I got it working using esd and a java version of esd, however the sound quality sucked (and java's sound support didn't like my 5.1 sound, I wouldn't mind but it had 0 bass).
I've looked but can not find a native sound server for windows at all, in any form. Even somthing compiled with cygwin would probably work, but no luck there either.