PulseAudio 2.0 Runs On HURD, Has Jack Detection

[e8hffff]

Regarding Ubuntu repositories, it's a shame one has to wait or add obscure repos to get new content like new gimp or pulseaudo 2.

[ChrisXY]

don't kid yourself -- dmix is NOT a viable option. dmix is a nasty hack. It has 100 times more bugs than PA; it doesn't even work with half of the ALSA apps let alone anything else! And it has a fixed (high) amount of latency and does not handle dropouts (whole-system / kernel lags) well at all. I've also noticed that dmix tends to interfere with some applications because it does so much "in-process". It basically just tickles a shared memory segment and you'd be lucky if a bunch of applications can "cooperate" on this. Easy to screw it up.

Very well, but I wonder what your problem with dmix is? It may be a hack but I don't recall having problems with it. It just worked for me, too.

Most of ALSA's "support" for these features is a joke. This code is not really maintained and doesn't work with software mixing, well or at all. Also, in case you didn't notice, having to manage configuration files that are touched by lots of programs is an absolute nightmare. Why do you think X.Org is trying to get people to stop using xorg.conf ? Because it's a mess and it's much easier to auto-detect the right settings and let the user change them at runtime with a GUI. This is why it's very easy to write a GUI to configure your monitors with xrandr, but very hard to write a GUI to configure your screens with xorg.conf (iirc only SUSE still supports that and I think they even deprecated YaST's support for xorg.conf recently... it was called SaX2 iirc).

I think the better point is that you have to restart the sound output of every application that uses alsa when changing the .asoundrc.

Also, pulseaudio seems to be able to set LADSPA effects too. At least the latest veromix has a gui for it, but it doesn't work for me yet.

[Chewi]

Very well, but I wonder what your problem with dmix is? It may be a hack but I don't recall having problems with it. It just worked for me, too.

Lucky you. I wasn't so lucky. dmix hates surround and that's just one of the problems.

[ChrisXY]

Lucky you. I wasn't so lucky. dmix hates surround and that's just one of the problems.

Yes, for surround sound I always had to choose direct hardware access because the .asoundrc hacks didn't really work. On the other hand I haven't really gotten "true" surround sound with pulseaudio to work either.

[Larian]

I use VLC as playback engine which directly talks to ALSA. It does everything I want just fine. I do not have PA or any sound server in between installed at all.

How did you accomplish this? By that I mean are you routing ALL your audio from your machine, (system sounds, games, browser, etc...) through VLC? It sounds interesting and I'd like to know more.

[Chewi]

Yes, for surround sound I always had to choose direct hardware access because the .asoundrc hacks didn't really work. On the other hand I haven't really gotten "true" surround sound with pulseaudio to work either.

What do you mean by "true" surround sound? It worked out of the box here.

[NomadDemon]

same here, xonar dx and PA works perfect, even latency is unnoticable.

if you have buty HW0, no other program can access hardware on same moment. so.. if you watch movi, you dont have sounds from i.e. pidgin. this is not an option in normal environment.

[kraftman]

Linux sound stack needs an overhaul. Too many abstraction layers

How many more layers are there compared to Windows and OS X?

[ariendj]

I'm in total agreement with allquixotic: great breakdown of what is Pulse and what is ALSA.

In my opinion there are not too many layers. There are exactly enough layers.

ALSA for speaking to your hardware
Pulse for managing input and output streams and sample rate conversions
JACK for specialized music production software running at a fixed latency and a fixed sample rate

One decent, specialized tool for every job. KISS. Take any of these away and you are left with an incomplete ecosystem.

Should you need to, you can connect Pulse and JACK just fine. KXStudio 10.04 already did that nicely. I used to run youtube videos through the JACK based Calf plugin suite just for the fun of it.

In general I'm rather happy with the Linux/Freedesktop audio stack. It's very transparent and I can shape it almost any way I like. You just need to know what the individual pieces are for.

[Ragas]

Therein lies your problem -- you're "trying" it rather than actually using it. Don't just give it 5 seconds every 3 months and decide you hate it. Confirmation bias: if you go into it disliking it, you're going to hate it no matter what it does.

I've tried it for one month. There are a lot of workarounds needed to get every application working. And when you look into the ubuntu repositorys, what they have done to gt all this stuff working .... no thanks.

And before you say that PA can do software mixing, don't kid yourself -- dmix is NOT a viable option. dmix is a nasty hack. It has 100 times more bugs than PA; it doesn't even work with half of the ALSA apps let alone anything else!

It's weird then that dmix works with all applications that I have ever seen and PA does not, isn't it?
I have a 7.1 surround sound setup with normalization over here.

I don't know about latency, may be worse than PA but it's certainly not too much.

It doesn't try to manage anything. It's up to the app if it wants to connect to PA or not.

Nope, it replaces the default pcm of Alsa, so it really does try to manage everything. If you don't want that you will have to start creating workarounds. which can be quite funny considering that it's not that easy for every program to tell it that it shouldn't connect to the default pcm.

PulseAudio can't help it that ALSA doesn't have built-in software mixing; apps that want to hook into hw:0 are broken by design (not only PA authors agree with this, also the ALSA developers agree with this) because direct hardware access is supposed to be reserved for infrastructure such as PA itself.

O come on you talk about dmix and then you are saying that "ALSA doesn't have built-in software mixing"? Please be reasonable.
We can agree on the HW:0 thing though.

Oh, and most users will want the exact opposite than you: they want all their apps to route through PA so that they can control all the volumes in the same place, and only have to deal with one set of configuration: PA's, which is in a real nice GUI. So distros configure apps so that most apps will play through PA out of the box. This is the right approach IMHO.

Please read my post again. I'm explicitly saying that I want that too. An a real nice gui is a real nice thing but it really is not essential. I want that stuff to work and after that we can make the real nice gui. And working it is definitely not with Pulseaudio.

Most of ALSA's "support" for these features is a joke. This code is not really maintained and doesn't work with software mixing, well or at all.

Actually I've had some problems in the past. But the corresponding bugs are fixed now and it works at least for me.

Also, in case you didn't notice, having to manage configuration files that are touched by lots of programs is an absolute nightmare. Why do you think X.Org is trying to get people to stop using xorg.conf ? Because it's a mess and it's much easier to auto-detect the right settings and let the user change them at runtime with a GUI. This is why it's very easy to write a GUI to configure your monitors with xrandr, but very hard to write a GUI to configure your screens with xorg.conf (iirc only SUSE still supports that and I think they even deprecated YaST's support for xorg.conf recently... it was called SaX2 iirc).

Well you are probably right with that.

Only someone who runs an app that is poorly coded to force initializing hw:0 would say something like this. If all you use are apps that are compatible with PA by either using the "Safe ALSA Subset" or PA directly or any of its downstream consumers (openal-soft, SDL, wine, etc), then you have no reason to complain about PA because it "just works".

Nope. I have no such program ... haven't stumbled upon one in a looooooong time. But PA still doesn't "just" work. try looking into some of the distributions repositories for how many workarounds there are in place. Wine is a nice example.

I probably could also live with it if every application would start using pulseaudio exclusively but we are still not at that point.