PulseAudio 2.0 Runs On HURD, Has Jack Detection

[Ragas]

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.

Works here. But true it is way to hard to setup. The cool thing about is that I can setup per channel equalizing, filtering the bass out for the small boxes and leaving it for the big ones.

[ChrisXY]

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

I mean that I have an audio stream with 6 Channels and each Channel is being played on exactly the correct speaker. I always had some weird mixing going on but maybe this has gotten better now, since last time I used a surround system is some time ago.

[NomadDemon]

PA plays 6 channels with no problem.

if your audio is like 2.0 it multiple signal to 2 stereo [copy]

i dont need to use subbass [normal 2x 2.0 cabinets with large speakers 8"]

imo subwoofer is peace of shit compared to large woofers in normal speakers

[Bestia]

I've tried using this on a fresh 12.04 LTS and it is still a crap. Everytime my CPU would get into 100% usage and memory was low I had a huge gaps in sound playback (going as high as 3 seconds). That's just unacceptable so I just purge it and ALSA also. Those were replaced with OSSv4 which doesn't have such huge problems. Unfortunately even with that there are sometimes stream interruptions but nowhere as bad as PulseAudio (only in extreme situations).

There was a news on Phoronix that Chrome/Chromium will have PulseAudio support gues what it won't have it because there is no one to work on it so it's only ALSA. I've tried two games through NaCl Bastion and From Dust both were horrible in regards to sound output when I had PulseAudio and they are good on Open Sound System with ALSA emulation.

Look at the last comment in this bug report: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/is...wner%20Summary

Look at comments 48, 49 and 50: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/is...wner%20Summary

[e8hffff]

There was a news on Phoronix that Chrome/Chromium will have PulseAudio support gues what it won't have it because there is no one to work on it so it's only ALSA. I've tried two games through NaCl Bastion and From Dust both were horrible in regards to sound output when I had PulseAudio and they are good on Open Sound System with ALSA emulation.

PulseAudio is the best thing happened to Linux regarding sound.

What would you rather have, everyone using ALSA or OSS and only having one sound application able to run at once? That is clearly unprofessional.

Most whiners about PulseAudio are those that have badly setup operating systems or messy settings. You do need to force all your applications to use PulseAudio instead of ALSA, and those that don't give you the option, then uninstall those. You do need to configure PulseAudio too, and that means setting channels and volumes.

What I would like more power in is PulseAudio virtual channels. Coders need to give users options to allow for better mixing of channels.

[uid313]

alternate sample rates
What is this and why should I care? What is it good for?

jack detection
This means if you plug in your headphones then audio stops coming from the speakers and start coming from the headphones.
If you unplug your headphones, then audio resumes from the speakers.

echo cancellation
This means you can record better with a microphone, and it will cancel the echo.

virtual surround module
What is this and why should I care? What is it good for?

Xen para-virtualized audio-sink
What is this and why should I care? What is it good for?

fixed HURD support
This means PulseAudio now supports the GNU Hurd operating system kernel.

A2DP decoder quality improvements
This means something about Bluetooth improved.

[Bestia]

What would you rather have, everyone using ALSA or OSS and only having one sound application able to run at once? That is clearly unprofessional.

Most whiners about PulseAudio are those that have badly setup operating systems or messy settings. You do need to force all your applications to use PulseAudio instead of ALSA, and those that don't give you the option, then uninstall those. You do need to configure PulseAudio too, and that means setting channels and volumes.

You do realise that OSSv4 can play sound from multiple programs simultaneously and has per app volume control. Configuration of programs won't change any of the problems I've mentioned.

Wine is another aspect of where PulseAudio just plain obviously suck. I've used the packages from Wine Ubuntu PPA and in winecfg it appeared as winepulse is in use (and winepulse.drv is installed).

[Awesomeness]

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.

It's not that hard. It's one of the basic features of KDE’s Phonon. Phonon is just a simple API wrapper for playback engines (not a sound server as some people mistake Phonon to be). All system sounds, music or videos are played through that.
Obviously I have the option to stack as many layers as I want. I could use PA. I could also use GStreamer, then additionally stack additional GStreamer plugins to get basic media playback

As for the browser, I use Firefox with the ViewTube Greasemonkey script which can use VLC’s Mozilla plugin for YouTube and other video sites (or any other plugin – mplayer or whatever one likes…).

Games: I don't play games on Linux. I have my gaming consoles for that.

[e8hffff]

You do realise that OSSv4 can play sound from multiple programs simultaneously and has per app volume control. Configuration of programs won't change any of the problems I've mentioned.

What, is this a modern feature? Is OSS's need for kernel OSS drivers a problem?

Wine is another aspect of where PulseAudio just plain obviously suck. I've used the packages from Wine Ubuntu PPA and in winecfg it appeared as winepulse is in use (and winepulse.drv is installed).

Yeah that's one gripe I do have, but that's Wine's fault. They dropped PulseAudio support and reverted back to ALSA. Like you alude to, you can get a build from Launchpad.net for a PA enabled version.

In my opinion, the ultimate user goal/wants should be:
* multiple applications playing sound at once
* channel mixing, example recording and playing from different channels, or merged ones
* sound sync'ed properly
* speed of sound layer
* codec integration
* hardware use priority
* Coders supporting PA for OS and applications, giving power to the users. Example, I'm yet to see virtual channel manipulation in Ubuntu/Kubuntu sound panels or sound recording software.

[Bestia]

What, is this a modern feature? Is OSS's need for kernel OSS drivers a problem?

I think you are confusing OSSv3 which has been disabled or removed from Linux Kernel with OSSv4 which builds modules with DKMS.

Wine developers never wanted to have PulseAudio. They only consider ALSA and OSS. Winepulse is being worked on by Maarten Lankhorst http://repo.or.cz/w/wine/multimedia.git