I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm not very familiar with OS/2's driver structure/methodology.
This idea might be completely moot from the get-go but I figured there's no harm in seeing where discussion regarding it's feasibility might lead; especially considering how essential multi-stream audio is for any desktop OS and in particular, nearing the release of a browser which is very liable to support multimedia playback in a way we haven't seen for quite a few years.
I was setting up a software audio mixer on Windows earlier today. Like a lot of audio mixers - it interfaces with programs using a driver which relays all audio streams to the mixer program, the mixer program then sends the audio through to the hardware driver as a single combined stream.
It's worth noting a lot of Linux distros which use ALSA, from which Uniaud is based, run PulseAudio as a middleware audio mixer much in the way I have described in the above paragraph. I'm unsure if this concept has ever been toyed with in the OS/2 ecosystem, let alone if anything like it has existed in the past decade (accounting for the fact that some software designed for ECS no longer works in ArcaOS, i.e QEMU) .
Since ALSA(Uniaud) has already been ported to OS/2 with Paul Smedley to thank for the updated 32 bit builds, could there be any possibility for a PulseAudio port? Considering that the project has been active since 2004, perhaps an older build could be a candidate for this undertaking. Keeping in mind that ALSA and PulseAudio are often used in tandem as the two halves of the Linux audio package and it's prominence in being a go-to solution, I am hoping they would be able to cooperate as intended to a similar extent in OS/2.
Lastly, for what it's worth, I put together a rough diagram for how such a solution may possibly work - it does match quite closely to Pulseaudio's flow however.
- Ibrahim
