Why is there no artsd/esd support in Java Sound?
In Florian’s and my opinion, mixing daemons like artsd, esd, JACK, rplay, NAS, yiff, … are hacks that work around a shortcoming of the device drivers. We feel that mixing should be done either by the soundcard hardware or in software by the device driver. For Windows (DirectSound) and Solaris, this is self-evident, while Linux is lagging behind. The OSS driver model is obsolete technology anyway, and ALSA can do mixing in software with the dmix plug-in. With this state of affairs, all these discussions about mixing daemons could be settled once for all. Never again would a sound program have to reinvent the wheel with output plugins for /dev/dsp, ALSA, esd, arts, [you name it]. This would be a very efficient solution in terms of using (vs. wasting) programmer time. It would even enable the coexistence of several mixing daemons for backward compatibility. So why not do the obvious, elegant, technically clean, (human) resource saving? By the way, Tritonus provides support for esd (for
