Re: play-sound-file & esd

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    - There are several sound daemons out there: 
      - esd used by gnome
      - arts used by kde
      - gstreamer

    I would say that finding a solution for emacs that always manages to
    play a sound withouth configuration is next to impossible.

I'm not sure what "without configuration" means in this case.
Do you mean, a single method that works in all cases?
We don't need it to be one single method; Emacs is configured for
many aspects of the system, and there's no harm in having more.

    Maybe a solution would be to make it possible to configure an external
    player command, when the internal method is not suficient?

If that works, it is good.  For instance, if working thru esd can be
done conveniently by forking an external program, that would be an ok
implementation.

What about arts and gstreamer?  Can they be used by fork/exec too?

      - jackd used by people interested in music applications

It sounds like that one is less common and thus less important to
support.  However, if it too can be supported by forking an external
program, that would be nice.  Can it be?


However, given that ALSA now includes a software mixer capability,
implementing direct communication with ALSA is also a good solution.
Probably better, since it would work with esd, arts, gstreamer, and
jackd, without having to know about them.  It would also be much more
efficient.