Instant Advantages

ESD provides the application developer with some instant advantages:

• ESD has the ability to do network transparent audio if desired.

• ESD can keep ownership of the audio device to one user, such as audio, and then grant authentication keys to specific users for access. Removing users is as simple as changing the authentication key.

• Programs that are unable to handle ``lesser'' audio devices (ones that can only output 16 bit stereo 44.1kHz audio) can still run, as ESD will mix down automatically and transparently for the application.

• With ESD more than one application can access the sound device at once.

• Non ESD-enabled applications can be fooled into being ESD applications by using ESD's hack:

  esddsp app_name -parameters to -the application

  This will redirect the application to use ESD instead of /dev/dsp.

• You can monitor all mixed output to the audio device. esdmon is a quick example of this. This is useful for being able to do waveform displays for audio output from your computer.