On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 23:31 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> By "competing for use" I mean "competing for use at the same time".
> I don't mind different file types linking to different programs,
> as long as the link is reasonably transparent.
> But I don't want several programs being linked to the same file-type,
> as seems the case here, unless I am explicitly asked
> which I want to use.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I have several audio players, one is
the default for each file type. Double clicking on a file opens the
default player. If I want to use a different player I right click and
choose another player from the pop-up menu. This seems like a pretty
good system to me.
> I'm not sure what the second sentence means.
> Why is pulseaudio sitting there?
> And what exactly is its function in this case,
>From the PulseAudio web page:
A sound server can serve many functions:
* Software mixing of multiple audio streams, bypassing any
restrictions the hardware has.
* Network transparency, allowing an application to play back or
record audio on a different machine than the one it is running
on.
* Sound API abstraction, alleviating the need for multiple
backends in applications to handle the wide diversity of sound
systems out there.
* Generic hardware abstraction, giving the possibility of doing
things like individual volumes per application.
