esound for PPC

[Eric Dorland]

On Mon, Oct 11, 1999 at 02:06:49AM -0400, Eric Dorland wrote:
> Well, I've been following the development of enlightenment (0.16 just been
> released, BTW) and they've got a fix in their sound code which fixes sound
> playing (in E anyway). The fix has more to do with libaudiofile than esd. On
> lines 80-84 in sound.c (the LoadWav function) we find:
> 
> #ifdef WORDS_BIGENDIAN
>       afSetVirtualByteOrder(in_file, AF_DEFAULT_TRACK, AF_BYTEORDER_BIGENDIAN);
>    #else
>       afSetVirtualByteOrder(in_file, AF_DEFAULT_TRACK, AF_BYTEORDER_LITTLEENDIAN);
> #endif
> 
> I don't know audiofile particularly well, but its obvious this is telling
> audiofile to output the file in as big-endian for the later afReadFrames
> statement. This means any application that's using audiofile should have
> this line in them, and audiofile should compile by default with the Virtual
> Byte Order set to big-endian on big-endian machines (the current version may
> do this, I haven't looked at the code). GNOME's sound code doesn't have this
> hack, so I'm going to send them a patch, hopefully in time for 1.0.50.

I little browsing of the code does show that libaudiofile sets the virtual
byte order, by default, to the correct setting for the current architecture.
And looking at gnome-libs, up in till last week, the sound code was
explicitly setting the virtual byte order to little-endian. Thankfully now
its fixed, so the next build of GNOME should have working sound.

It appears I spoke to soon about sound working perfectly. Whenever esd plays
a 16bit wav file, the sound plays at about half speed. Ugg. At least its not
static anymore. I'm going to see if I can track down why this is happening
(maybe its some on-the-fly endianess swaping slowing it down), but I don't
know sound code all that well, so anyone that does, please lend a hand.

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