Just saw an article on whats up next in Linux desktop standardization where there is blurb talking about the discussion at the latest ODSL Desktop Architects Meeting about the issues around Linux Audio (or multimedia in general if you want).

The final outcome was this: It was decided to start addressing these issues by creating a focus group and mailing a list of what’s needed from audio APIs, and how to deal with bringing consistency to Linux audio.

Which is exactly the kind of outcome a conference like this can ever hope to achieve and which also shows why it is a complete waste of time trying to address the issue in such a forum.

The DAM meetings are set up as a ‘lets get everyone together to see if we can find common ground’ type of meeting. Which isn’t bad, but it only lends itself to a certain type of problems.

The problem with Linux audio is not that people out there do not ‘know’ what the problem is, the problem is that people disagree, often quite strongly on how to solve it, and that there is limited resources available for solving it using any solution. So instead of actually moving towards solving it we get a lot of cute discussions on related topics such as when to push and when to pull as one example.

To solve the problems mentioned in the article you will need to step on some toes, sink a lot of man hours into the chosen solution and in the end win out on excellence. Which surprisingly is a bit harder than one would think :)

I think the ODSL-DAM context fails horribly already on the first hurdle, in the sense that the DAM conference is not set up to do any kind of toe stepping, rather to the contrary. Not that I am saying that the DAM type meetings are useless, not at all, but a format made for trying to increase cooperation between two quite mature and well established solutions like GNOME and KDE doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to a problem requiring some painful trailblazing.

That said I do think the problems are being addressed, but they are not and will not be addressed by things like ODSL DAM, instead they are being addressed by individual developers, contributing companies and distributions who are already all moving in mostly the same direction. The thing is however that for the contexts these people and groups are moving something like DAM is more of a distraction than a valuable contribution towards the end goal at this point in time.

To let on where I see things moving based on what the distro’s are doing I will say that on the audio side the solution that is gaining traction is PulseAudio which will be run on top of ALSA and providing legacy support for ESD and OSS. For the codec problem there are solutions being worked on around GStreamer.

Within the context of these technologies and some other technologies that comes as a consequence around them also longer term plans are made for addressing the issues faced. For instance making sure that Pulse Audio is an acceptable solution for both people doing so called pro-audio and for the normal desktop, like it is on MacOSX.