Regarding default audio drivers for various platforms:
My .csd's are designed for all major platforms, and I like to include all my 
commandline options within the  tag. This is because I don't want 
to have to depend upon .csoundrc being present (indeed, I'm not sure that 
OLPC or Sugar on a Stick use this file, or where it might be located; surely 
many users, especially children, would be aware of such things).

As a result, it is very important that all widely-distributed Csound builds 
contain a default audio driver that is included in the distribution, and 
that will work when no driver is specified within  (and assuming 
no .csoundrc is available).

I raise this issue because the current 5.10 distro for Sugar on a Stick 
defaults to PortAudio even though PortAudio is not included. Currently, to 
get ALSA, which *is* included, I need to *specify* ALSA. I'm fine with a 
Linux default of ALSA that will work without a .csoundrc file, as long as I 
can count on ALSA being present.

I guess it's just that there should be a true default that can be counted on 
to be present, and only require "-odac".

In a related but separate matter:
I also wish that the situation were similar for MIDI: that the default be 
either "-M" or "-M0" and that the individual platform took it from there. I 
know that  would, in this case, require either one or the other 
of these tags; but having to deal with the particular case of "hw:1,0" for 
Linux means again that separate sets of  (assuming the absence of 
.csoundrc) need to be furnished for different platforms. Indeed, this is 
what I'm currently doing - which creates an impediment for the user (i.e., 
file needs to be edited).

Art Hunkins

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andres Cabrera" 
To: "Peter Robinson" 
Cc: "Art Hunkins" ; "Sugar devel" 
; "Michael Gogins" 

Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2009 8:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] [Csnd] Re: Latest Project


Hi,

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> I've also spotted another issue. Though Csound is set for ALSA audio 
>> drivers
>> (whether they are specified in CsOptions or not), it cannot find them and
>> aborts with "can't open device "plughw" for audio output. Seems we need 
>> to
>> get audio output straightened up as well. Note: this was not a problem 
>> with
>> OLPCsound (5.08); ALSA drivers were expected and found, whether they were
>> specified or not. (Though this is fine with me, canonical Csound normally
>> defaults to portaudio on all platforms - so I didn't expect this 
>> behavior.
>> Perhaps XO/Sugar/OLPCsound purposefully doesn't include portaudio?)
>
> portaudio isn't used in Fedora, do you mean pulseaudio?
>

Its not there by default, but it can be added. Csound can be built
without portaudio, and has been for Sugar. Portaudio is a different
beast from Pulseaudio, since its not an audio server, but a hardware
abstraction system.

But this makes me think, that since Csound supports pulseaudio as
well, should it be built with pulseaudio enabled and used by default?
Maybe the only problem would be latency, but there would be a
significant improvement in usability since Csound won't lock the audio
hardware and Csound will run fine even if other software is using the
audio hardware.

Cheers,
Andrés 


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