Re: [RFC 00/24] audio: add GStreamer backend

[Christian Schoenebeck <qemu_oss@crudebyte.com>]

On Monday, 1 December 2025 14:02:41 CET BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2025, marcandre.lureau@redhat.com wrote:
> > From: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
[...]
> > The following patch series provides a GStreamer-based audio backend, which
> > could ultimately allow QEMU to leverage the framework to support the
> > various audio subsystems and simplify the audio handling logic (timing,
> > resampling, mixing etc), as well as allow greater pipeline flexibility
> > and customization.
>
> While it's good to have a GStreamer backend to integrate well into systems
> already using that, this should not replace existing audio backends in
> QEMU. The reason is that GStreamer has extensive dependencies that I would
> like to avoid and still be able to use QEMU with just an ALSA or SDL audio
> backend that are much leaner and provide the needed functionality for most
> cases. Also when using jack you'd want to have a QEMU backend for it not
> going through multiple layers. So adding a GStreamer backend has its use
> as another audio backend but not as a replacement for QEMU's audio
> handling logic and backends.
> 
> Regards,
> BALATON Zoltan

I agree with Zoltan on this. GStreamer is nice as new backend, but I would 
also preserve the existing audio backends for the same reasons already 
described by Zoltan.

/Christian