Re: [Jack-Devel] [andraudio] Google I/O: High performance audio talk
On Thu, May 23, 2013 12:54 am, John Emmas wrote:
>
> What Google is saying is that
> whilst they want to position Android as a flexible OS that anyone can
> work with, that doesn't necessarily mean developing it for high power
> multimedia use (or for that matter, laboratory use / mission critical
> usage or any other specialized usage). As Ralf went on to say, they're
> positioning Android as an OS for tablets and other hand-held devices.
> If users start demanding powerful multimedia apps for Android (or
> Android starts losing sales to iOS) things will no doubt change.
>
Android is a Linux Operating System that explicitly relies on the hard
work done by the Linux Audio Development community to provide audio on the
devices that it is running on.
There is no rational technical reason that it *cannot* allow us to run
JACK or any other audio system including coreaudio, pulse audio, etc...
The only reason is that a few people at Google who have had very little if
anything to do with Linux Audio Development have decided to not allow it
like some kind of Big Brother thought experiment.
Due to their completely illogical and unnecessary decision to ignore
professional audio needs, professional audio developers and companies
that make a business out of professional audio running on Linux (those are
the only ones I am interested in) are excluded from targeting Android as a
sales platform.
Given that there are now over 800 million and climbing devices running
Android and Android is nearly 80% of all smart phone sales globally that
is a significant market that they have excluded us from. It's anti
competitive behaviour and may even be grounds for a class action law suit.
The question is why do they feel that they have the right to make this
decision on our behalf while continuing to ignore the feedback from the
Linux Audio Development community and at the same time generating billions
of dollars of profit from our hard work and contributing very little back
to the community in return.
Are we supposed to pat them on the back and exclaim how wonderful it is
that they have now made it possible to run 64 voices on a virtual synth
with 20ms latency via hardware mixing? They get paid to provide a quality
product for a broad range of use cases and instead they are pissing around
with their own toy projects claiming success when they do something that
is good for them but completely ignoring the needs of the wider
professional audio market to make an income out of the Android platform.
There was a problem with Pulse Audio for a while where it would hog the
resources unless explicitly turned off and that made it a very frustrating
user experience for a great many people that still has a negative impact
on the perception of the audio systems on the Linux platform. In the case
of Android development we have been completely ignored for over 4 years
while these supposedly genius level, highly paid developers at Google
tinker with the audio systems and learn how to do what we have already
figured out over 10 years ago with JACK. If they had bothered to ask we
could have given them all the information they needed within a weeks worth
of discussions.
The decided not to use pulse audio or JACK. Instead they gave us Audio
Flinger. That was a complete failure so they suggested we use OpenSL. That
has also been a failure and now they are suggesting we settle for hardware
mixing with 20ms latency. Why is it so hard to see that they are
completely missing the point of an Open Audio Platform developed by some
of the brightest audio professionals on the planet within a community and
peer reviewed process over the past 15 years?
The simple fact is these guys just don't know JACK.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd
1369250428.29674_0.ltw:2,a <49901.188.26.171.156.1369250416.squirrel at boosthardware dot com>