[CM] No Auto Connect

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Kjetil S. Matheussen wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
>> On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 21:01 -0800, Kjetil S. Matheussen wrote:
>>> Esben Stien:
>>>> 
>>>> Would be nice if SND could not connect to anything by default. This is
>>>> not proper for JACK applications.
>>> 
>>> I completely disagree. I would think that about 99.999% of the
>>> users would prefer the ports to be autoconnected, and therefore
>>> its also the proper behaviour for most jack applications.
>>> 
>>> It shouldn't be a big problem to make an option not to autoconnect
>>> though... Do you have a good reason why it shouldn't autoconnect?
>> 
>> "autoconnect" makes it (slightly?) harder to use snd in situations where
>> the destination (or source) of the audio stream is not the sound card.
>> It also ties the creation of input/output Jack ports to the capabilities
>> of the soundcard. Most Jack applications do not (by default)
>> autoconnect.
>
> This sounds very theoretical to me... Have you ever disconnected the the 
> output of snd (or other programs using sndlib) from the soundcard?

Nope. Perhaps because I don't use them too frequently as Jack clients.

>> An option for that would be great...
>
> Okey, is MUS_JACK_DONT_AUTOCONNECT an okey name for an enviornment variable 
> for this?

If the code is changed there are two things that could be addressed. One 
is whether sndlib should autoconnect or not. The other is, if it 
autoconnects, that what ports it should. While the assumption of regular 
physical i/o ports is right most of the time it would be nice if that 
behavior could be controlled (in the same way that you can control 
soundcard and device in the case of alsa).

I have not done a census of Jack applications but my feeling is that most 
don't connect by default.

-- Fernando