address@hidden: Re: Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3]

[Richard Stallman]

Is anyone interested in implementing asynchronous playing of sound in
Emacs?  Forking sounds like a rather heavyweight method; perhaps the
sound output facilities have asynchronous output features.  Gerd,
do you know what is available?

------- Start of forwarded message -------
From: TV Raman <address@hidden>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 16:17:05 -0700
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
Subject: Re: Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3
In-Reply-To: <address@hidden>
Reply-To: address@hidden


I looked at the code in  src/sound.c --and things look okay with
respect to how the sound is played.

The problem is that the function as written is synchronous
- --i.e. returns only ater the sound is done playing 
- --which explains the slowness I perceived.

It might be useful to have the function parse its args, check the
validity of the sound data --and then 
fork to play the sound so emacs can continue what it is doing.
Richard Stallman writes:
 >     If you use the built-in play-sound function, 
 >     things feel  slower than when using (shell-command "play "...)
 > 
 >     It's hard to articulate the "feel slower" bit --
 >     but at least when I switched emacspeak to start using play-sound,
 >     the rest of emacs felt sluggish.
 > 
 > Can you investigate a little--by seeing what method Emacs uses to play
 > a sound, and what method the `play' program uses?  Maybe we're not
 > using the best method, or we might be using it wrong.
 > 
 > Unfortunately I know next to nothing about the facilities for playing
 > sound.

- -- 
Best Regards,
- --raman
- ------------------------------------------------------------
T. V. Raman:  PhD (Cornell University)
IBM Research: Human Language Technologies
Architect:    Conversational And Multimodal WWW Standards
Phone:        1 (408) 927 2608   T-Line 457-2608
Fax:        1 (408) 927 3012
Email:        address@hidden
WWW:      http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/raman
AIM:      TVRaman
PGP:          http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman.asc
Snail:        IBM Almaden Research Center,
              650 Harry Road
              San Jose 95120
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