Enlightened Sound Daemon

In computing, the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD or EsounD) is the sound server for Enlightenment and GNOME.

ESD will mix together the simultaneous audio output of multiple running programs, and output the resulting stream to the sound card.

ESD can also manage network-transparent audio. As such, an application that supports ESD can output audio over the network, to any connected computer that is running an ESD server.

ESD support must be specifically written and added into applications, as ESD does not emulate normal audio hardware APIs. Since ESD has been around for over a decade, earlier than almost any other sound server, a very large number of Unix applications have support for ESD output built-in, or available as an add-ons.

ESD is maintained as part of the GNOME project.

Alternative sound daemons include JACK Audio Connection Kit (which does not provide network transparency, but netjack can), aRtsd, NAS and PulseAudio.

External links

* [http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/overview.html EsounD - The Enlightened Sound Daemon - Overview] (old project home page)
* [http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/esound/0.2/ Current Gnome EsounD source archive] (current Gnome releases)