[Scummvm-devel] Linux music progress report (with Timidity)

[David Given]

On Monday 19 November 2001 12:47, you wrote:
[...]
> On my box (Redhat 7.2) timidity was compiled to use ESD by default, and
> it ran really, REALLY slow. 4 or 5 times too slow. I've got it talking
> directly to the sound card now (run with -Od), and it's just a bit slow,
> maybe at 50 or 60 percent or full speed, similar to your experiences. Eg
> in the intro the surfy music played when Hoagie's Chron-O-John crashes
> is actually played as Bernard emerges from his, covered in water.

In my experience, ESD is crap. Completely. It's slow, it's big, it depends on 
lots of libraries, it's undocumented, it's unmaintained, the interface is 
broken.

(In order to get sound working for an in-house application we found ourselves 
having to interface to ESD. Shame on me, I even suggested it. *shudder*)

At one point I was trying to record video using mp1e. The audio was being 
recorded about five seconds out of sync. When I uninstalled esd, it worked 
fine.

[...]
> Yeah. I wonder why the SDL_mixer guys used a copy of the timidity code
> internally. Maybe timidity wasn't installed on most machines by default
> at that time. Or maybe they anted to do some stuff that the timidity
> interface didn't allow? Seems unlikely: the SDL_mixer interface is
> really basic.

The Timidity remote interface is fairly new --- the first I heard of it was 
when someone mentioned it here. Perhaps SDL_mixer predates it?

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