BSE Driver Package
==================

This is a BSE (Bedevilled Sound Engine) plugin/driver package.  In order to
build this package, you need recent versions of BSE (>=0.6.4) and PortAudioV19.

PortAudio (>= V19):
  http://www.portaudio.com/

The official ftp site for BEAST/BSE is:
  ftp://beast.gtk.org/pub/beast

The official web site for BEAST/BSE is:
  http://beast.gtk.org/

There also is a mailing list for the project (beast@gnome.org):
  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast/

And a related IRC channel:
  #beast on GimpNet (irc.gimp.org:6666)

Installation
============

This package is a driver package and may install files under a prefix different
from the prefix specified at configure time.  In particular, the BSE drivers
build from this package will be installed under the drivers/. subdirectory of
an existing libbse installation. The exact installation location can be found
out via pkg-config with:

  pkg-config --variable=driverdir bse	

For general installation instructions, see the file `INSTALL'.

Known Issues with this Version
==============================

* The BSE-PortAudio driver doesn't yet work with the PortAudio JACK driver

  Although one of the motivations for implementing the PortAudioV19 support
  was JACK support, it turned out that we needed to use the PortAudios
  blocking API for integrating with BEAST properly. This discussion can be
  read at PortAudios list archive:

  http://techweb.rfa.org/pipermail/portaudio/2004-November/003979.html

  Since the PortAudio JACK driver doesn't support blocking PCM access yet,
  we started to work on a patch against PortAudio that will fix this.
  We already got it working with a modified version of PortAudio, but
  there's still some cleanup work to do before folding changes back to
  the PortAudio Team. Once this happened, the PortAudio driver is supposed
  to support JACK, OSS and ALSA.

* The BSE-PortAudio driver depends on a CVS version of PortAudioV19

  Since PortAudioV19 has not publically been released yet, this driver
  currently depends on CVS snapshots which can be obtained from:
  
      http://www.portaudio.com/archives/pa_snapshot_v19.tar.gz

* The BSE-PortAudio is largly untested

  Stefan Westerfeld only tested the driver in a local setup, so feedback
  about non-working and working drivers is appreciated.
  It appears that some cards may not work when opened in readwrite mode
  through PortAudio. This hasn't yet been completely investigated,
  but PortAudio can be initialized using:

      $ beast -p portaudio=oss:0,wo
  
  to use the writeonly mode which really is supposed to work.

* The default device used may not be right

  BEAST requires the default device to be used to be listed first, but
  the driver doesn't sort according to PortAudio defaults yet.
  Thus starting BEAST with:

      $ beast -p portaudio
  
  BEAST may or may not be using the default PortAudio driver. For now, you
  may want to explicitely specify the driver to use, since the "default"
  option of the PortAudio driver is also not implemented correctly (it will
  probably be removed in the next release anyway).

* Latency for the OSS driver is not too good

  This appears to be PortAudios fault, because it doesn't initialize the
  fragment settings of OSS correctly. Again, this hasn't been investigated
  very deeply, but it looks like PortAudio should be patched to fix this.

* Feedback request
  
  Please let us know any issues you have with the driver, as mentioned above,
  we're interested in working and non-wroking driver reports.
  Feedback should be send to the BEAST mailing list:
  
  	EMail:   beast@gnome.org
  	List:    http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast/
  	Archive: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/beast/
