hex11
Forum Staple
Posts: 2059
Registered: 09-09 |
That musserver code from 1996 is quite useless as-is. It's just an architecture example. But something similar wouldn't be terribly difficult to make. Of course there are a few details to iron out, like for example how to control the volume? These days there are many music player front-ends that call upon separate programs to do the dirty work of actually playing an audio file, so it's a reasonable expectation. But there is also the matter of having separate streams for music and soundfx. So you can't just control a single mixer. Either the OS has to have some kind of server that allows multiplexed audio, or you have to fake it somehow in the musserver.
Some might not like this idea, because it sounds "dirty". It means people would have things configured in many different ways. But that flexibility is also its strength, because it means that a reasonable, working configuration should be possible for any system. Throwing away SDL to go with PortMidi or FMOD, or whatever else will just move the problem around a bit. Now maybe your machine will have good music, but someone else's won't. And those other things aren't even as portable as SDL. You'd be better off just fixing the SDL bugs if you wanted a "clean" one-size-fits-all solution.
Of course, in my example, you'd want to fix the SDL bugs anyway, since it would make a good default internal player for the musserver.
|
03-15-13 14:17 
