Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

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Original Message

Not that easy

Posted by Christine Tham on November 30, 2010 at 21:51:46:
Most players these days are based on gstreamer, which outputs to pulseaudio.

You can get a JACK output plugin for gstreamer, but JACK has the same problem (single master sample rate, changeable only by killing and restarting the daemon). Not practical for listening to multiple audio formats in one session.

Players not based on gstreamer are severely limited in their support of various audio formats.

And you want to stay away from ALSA. dmix is a poor quality mixing engine, considerably worse in quality compared to pulseaudio and JACK. Which is why Linux distributions are moving away from ALSA as an audio framework.

All in all, audio on Linux is a real nightmare. Gone are the good old days when Linux apps could just change the OSS sample rate on the fly. Now we have OSS emulation on top of ALSA, ALSA emulation on top of OSS, pulseaudio as a virtual audio device for ALSA, JACK on top of pulseaudio, and forget any romantic notion of bit-perfect for anything other than 16/44.1!