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   6 <title>polypaudio @PACKAGE_VERSION@</title>
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  11 <h1><a name="top">polypaudio @PACKAGE_VERSION@</a></h1>
  12
  13 <p><i>Copyright 2004 Lennart Poettering &lt;@PACKAGE_BUGREPORT@&gt;</i></p>
  14
  15 <ul class="toc">
  16     <li><a href="#license">License</a></li>
  17     <li><a href="#news">News</a></li>
  18     <li><a href="#overview">Overview</a></li>
  19     <li><a href="#status">Status</a></li>
  20     <li><a href="#documentation">Documentation</a></li>
  21     <li><a href="#requirements">Requirements</a></li>
  22     <li><a href="#installation">Installation</a></li>
  23     <li><a href="#acks">Acknowledgements</a></li>
  24     <li><a href="#download">Download</a></li>
  25 </ul>
  26
  27 <h2><a name="license">License</a></h2>
  28
  29 <p>This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  30 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
  31 published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
  32 License, or (at your option) any later version.</p>
  33
  34 <p>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
  35 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  36 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
  37 General Public License for more details.</p>
  38
  39 <p>You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  40 along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
  41 Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.</p>
  42
  43 <h2><a name="news">News</a></h2>
  44
  45 <div class="news-date">Fri Aug 20 2004: </div> <p class="news-text"><a
  46 href="@PACKAGE_URL@polypaudio-0.2.tar.gz">Version 0.2</a> released;
  47 changes include: added sample cache, introspection API, client API
  48 documentation, module autoloading, glib support, a module for intercepting X11 bell events, and much more.</p>
  49
  50 <div class="news-date">Sat Jul 17 2004: </div> <p class="news-text"><a
  51 href="@PACKAGE_URL@polypaudio-0.1.tar.gz">Version 0.1</a> released</p>
  52
  53 <h2><a name="overview">Overview</a></h2>
  54
  55 <p><tt>polypaudio</tt> is a sound server for Linux and other Unix like
  56 operating systems. It is intended to be an improved drop-in
  57 replacement for the <a
  58 href="http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/apps.html">Enlightened Sound
  59 Daemon</a> (ESOUND). In addition to the features ESOUND provides
  60 <tt>polypaudio</tt> has:</p>
  61
  62 <ul>
  63   <li>Extensible plugin architecture (by loading dynamic loadable modules with <tt>dlopen()</tt>)</li>
  64   <li>Support for more than one sink/source</li>
  65   <li>Better low latency behaviour</li>
  66   <li>Embedabble into other software (the core is available as C library)</li>
  67   <li>Completely asynchronous C API</li>
  68   <li>Simple command line interface for reconfiguring the daemon while running</li>
  69   <li>Flexible, implicit sample type conversion and resampling</li>
  70   <li>"Zero-Copy" architecture</li>
  71   <li>Module autoloading</li>
  72 </ul>
  73
  74 <p>Both the core and the client API are completely asynchronous making
  75 use of a simple main loop abstraction layer. This allows easy
  76 integration with asynchronous applications using the
  77 <tt>glib</tt>/<tt>gtk</tt> mainloop. Since the asynchronous API
  78 available through <tt>polyplib</tt> is quite difficult to use there is
  79 a simplified synchronous API wrapper <tt>polyplib-simple</tt>
  80 available. A simple main loop implementation is available as well.</p>
  81
  82 <p><tt>polypaudio</tt> is the successor of my previous, ill-fated
  83 attempt to write a sound server <a
  84 href="http://asd.sf.net/">asd</a>.</p>
  85
  86 <p>A GTK GUI manager application for polypaudio is the <a
  87 href="http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/paman/">Polypaudio Manager</a>.</p>
  88
  89 <h2><a name="status">Status</a></h2>
  90
  91 <p>Version @PACKAGE_VERSION@ is quite usable. It matches and supersedes ESOUND's feature set in nearly all areas.</p>
  92
  93 <h2><a name="documentation">Documentation</a></h2>
  94
  95 <p>There is some preliminary documentation available: <a
  96 href="modules.html"><tt>modules.html</tt></a>, <a
  97 href="cli.html"><tt>cli.html</tt></a>, <a
  98 href="daemon.html"><tt>daemon.html</tt></a>.</p>
  99
 100 <h3>First Steps</h3>
 101
 102 <p>Simply start the polypaudio daemon with the argument <tt>-C</tt></p>
 103
 104 <pre>polypaudio -C</pre>
 105
 106 <p>This will present you a screen like this:</p>
 107
 108 <pre>Welcome to polypaudio! Use "help" for usage information.
 109 &gt;&gt;&gt; </pre>
 110
 111 <p>Now you can issue CLI commands as described in <a
 112 href="cli.html"><tt>cli.html</tt></a>. Another way to start
 113 <tt>polypaudio</tt> is by specifying a configuration script like that one included in the distribution on the
 114 command line :</p>
 115
 116 <pre>polypaudio -F polypaudio.pa</pre>
 117
 118 <p>This will load some drivers and protocols automatically.</p>
 119
 120 <h3>Developing polypaudio Clients</h3>
 121
 122 <p>You may browse the <a href="http://www.doxygen.org/">Doxygen</a> generated <a
 123 href="http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/doxygen/">programing
 124 documentation</a> for the client API. (Run <tt>make doxygen</tt> to generate this documentation from the source tree)</p>
 125
 126 <h3>Developing polypaudio Modules</h3>
 127
 128 <p>There are several reasons for writing loadable modules for polypaudio:</p>
 129
 130 <ul>
 131   <li>Device driver support in addition to ALSA/OSS</li>
 132   <li>Protocol support beyond ESOUND's protocol and the native protocol. (such as NAS or a subset of aRts)</li>
 133   <li>New programming interfaces such as XMLRPC or DBUS for controlling the daemon.</li>
 134   <li>Hooking audio event sources directly into polypaudio (similar to <tt>module-x11-bell</tt>)</li>
 135   <li>For low latency applications such as VOIP: load the VOIP core directly into polypaudio and have a slim GUI frontend to control it.</li>
 136 </ul>
 137
 138 <p>There is currently no documentation how to write loadable modules
 139 for polypaudio. <i>Read the source, Luke!</i> If you are interested in
 140 writing new modules feel free to contact the author in case you have any
 141 questions.</p>
 142
 143 <h2><a name="requirements">Requirements</a></h2>
 144
 145 <p>Currently, <tt>polypaudio</tt> is tested on Linux only. It requires an OSS or ALSA compatible soundcard.</p>
 146
 147 <p><tt>polypaudio</tt> was developed and tested on Debian GNU/Linux
 148 "testing" from July 2004, it should work on most other Linux
 149 distributions (and maybe Unix versions) since it uses GNU autoconf and
 150 GNU libtool for source code configuration and shared library
 151 management.</p>
 152
 153 <p><tt>polypaudio</tt> needs <a
 154 href="http://www.mega-nerd.com/SRC/">Secret Rabbit Code (aka
 155 <tt>libsamplerate</tt>)</a>, <a href="http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile"><tt>libsndfile</tt></a>, <a
 156 href="http://www.alsa-project.org/">alsa-lib</a> and <a href="http://www.gtk.org/">GLIB</a>. (The latter is required for building the GLIB main loop integration module only.)</p>
 157
 158 <h2><a name="installation">Installation</a></h2>
 159
 160 <p>As this package is made with the GNU autotools you should run
 161 <tt>./configure</tt> inside the distribution directory for configuring
 162 the source tree. After that you should run <tt>make</tt> for
 163 compilation and <tt>make install</tt> (as root) for installation of
 164 <tt>polypaudio</tt>.</p>
 165
 166 <h2><a name="acks">Acknowledgements</a></h2>
 167
 168 <p>Eric B. Mitchell for writing ESOUND</p>
 169
 170 <h2><a name="download">Download</a></h2>
 171
 172 <p>The newest release is always available from <a href="@PACKAGE_URL@">@PACKAGE_URL@</a></p>
 173
 174 <p>The current release is <a href="@PACKAGE_URL@polypaudio-@PACKAGE_VERSION@.tar.gz">@PACKAGE_VERSION@</a></p>
 175
 176 <p>Get <tt>polypaudio</tt>'s development sources from the <a href="http://subversion.tigris.org/">Subversion</a> <a href="https://seth.intheinter.net:8081/svn/polypaudio/">repository</a>. (<a href="http://0pointer.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/?root=polypaudio">viewcvs</a>)</p>
 177
 178 <p>If you want to be notified whenever I release a new version of this software use the subscription feature of <a href="http://freshmeat.net/projects/polypaudio/">Freshmeat</a>.</p>
 179
 180 <hr/>
 181 <address class="grey">Lennart Poettering &lt;@PACKAGE_BUGREPORT@&gt;, August 2004</address>
 182 <div class="grey"><i>$Id$</i></div>
 183
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