"PulseAudio Is Still Awesome"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "PulseAudio Is Still Awesome"

Paul Frields, the manager of Fedora Engineering and former Fedora Project Leader, has written a blog post today about how "PulseAudio is still awesome." While this common Linux sound server has a bit of a bad reputation, he wanted to share how great it's been doing and working out for his needs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PulseAudio-2015-Awesome

[magika]

I felt embarrassed just reading that blog oh god... But I'm glad things work for him.
But things work even better if you remove unnecessary level of complexity and simply use ALSA :P

[RahulSundaram]

I felt embarrassed just reading that blog oh god... But I'm glad things work for him.
But things work even better if you remove unnecessary level of complexity and simply use ALSA :P

Perhaps for some users. I use different volumes for different apps, network audio and bluetooth headphones.

[-MacNuke-]

I have a PC with ArchLinux for Kodi and Emulation (retroarch)... With pulseaudio the emulation performance was poor and the sound in Kodi was distorted sometimes. I uninstalled pulseaudio and everything worked.

I don't have those problems on my notebook. Soo... I don't know... As long as I have a choice not to use it....

[LightBit]

PulseAudio Is Still Useless

"PulseAudio does not currently allow TrueHD or DTS-MA passthrough, this is a PulseAudio limitation and not a limitation of the Kodi implementation."

http://kodi.wiki/view/PulseAudio#PulseAudio_Output_Configuration

[magika]

Perhaps for some users. I use different volumes for different apps, network audio and bluetooth headphones.

You can have different volumes with ALSA. The rest are quite specific so unnecessary complexity layer (some software like PA) is necessary there.

[tenente]

That funny because I had an issue with pulseaudio automatically muting itself at every reboot on fedora 22 just 2 weeks ago (not really fixed yet because I'm lazy right now) ! But he must be right since he doesn't have problem with it anymore . Lucky me it's not my main system and I'm only using alsa on my the later (I know, goodbye Skype without pulseaudio).

Edit: I started reading his blog after posting (I didn't know he was using fedora 22, just coincidence)

[fritsch]

After first having implemented an Audio Engine for kodi and afterwards having added a Pulseaudio sink to our kodi software I really, really love what pulseaudio is doing. It takes away so much pain from developers. Hotplug support, Default device switching, bluetooth integration, network sink, tunnel, mixing. It has become very nice, major and stable.

To implement the same level of good working features in plain ALSA is, especially for sparetime devs, just not doable.

The comfort PA offers for endusers is just brilliant. On top you get nice, helpful devs. You join by in their irc channel and get done lots of things in no time.

Thanks to the PA devs for getting linux audio to a serious level.

[magika]

After first having implemented an Audio Engine for kodi and afterwards having added a Pulseaudio sink to our kodi software I really, really love what pulseaudio is doing. It takes away so much pain from developers. Hotplug support, Default device switching, bluetooth integration, network sink, tunnel, mixing. It has become very nice, major and stable.

To implement the same level of good working features in plain ALSA is, especially for sparetime devs, just not doable.

The comfort PA offers for endusers is just brilliant. On top you get nice, helpful devs. You join by in their irc channel and get done lots of things in no time.

Thanks to the PA devs for getting linux audio to a serious level.

Yea its really great. The only downside is that to use your app user has to install PA on his machine and configure it so that it wont hijack ALSA device.

[RahulSundaram]

You can have different volumes with ALSA. The rest are quite specific so unnecessary complexity layer (some software like PA) is necessary there.

It appears that you just want to declare features you don't need as unnecessary complexity. That doesn't negate the fact that users do need them and ALSA doesn't support them out of the box if at all. Hence the requirement for PulseAudio and use of it by pretty much every major distribution.