Pulse Audio 3

[wolftune]

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/ ... 71599.html

Not sure if this is really relevant as we are dealing with trying to get past the limitations of pulse, but interesting anyway.

[danboid]

All I want from Pulse is reliable hot-swapping of audio devices. It is flaky in v2 so I hope it works better in v3 as I have given up on v2 and now just use JACK to manually switch between audio output devices, which is slightly less hassle than changing my alsa conf and restarting ALSA every time I switch.

Phonon kinda sorta also seems to enable hot swapping but its just as unreliable as PA with the added problem of I have been unable to find a way to quickly, easily and reliably choose my output device other than messing with the sound output device order prefs in the KDE System Settings -> Multimedia -> Device Prefs, which is hardly an ideal way to do it plus KDE keeps on showing that stoopid 'Do you want KDE to forget about this removed device?' window even though I have chosen 'Do not ask again for this device' infinite times before and the device prefs don't seem to take effect most of the time anyway. Veromix only seems to control output for PA.

Has anyone on here got a rock-solid hotswap audio setup working, pref under Debian? I frequently want to switch between my onboard audio and my USB portable hifi mainly for Flash playback (under browsers) but I'd want it to work well with VLC, smplayer and clementine etc too.

[danboid]

I'm glad you've patched that bugger out F but its not much use to me if Phonon doesn't hot-swap reliably.

Have you spoke to upstream and told them what we all think of that 'special' prompt?

[danboid]

I mentioned Phonon because I was surprised recently to see KDE hotswap my audio from my internal soundcard to my USB hifi AFTER I'd uninstalled PA, although just like PA it only works sometimes.

To my knowledge, PA only really brings a few useful features over vanilla ALSA:

1 - Software mixing
2 - Hot swapping of audio output
3 - Network audio

I very rarely want or need to hear the output of 2 different apps when I'm not creating music and we have to use JACK for that, so 1 isn't really a big deal for me. I've tried 3 and it seems to be hopeless unless all devices have a wired connection so I'll probably never bother or want to mess with that again. 2 is the whole point of PA for me and I should expect I'm not alone in thinking a modern OS should be able to hotswap its audio without too much difficulty - Windows XP could do that and OSX has been able to do it for a long time so I'm hoping it works much more reliably in PA3.

lsusb, ALSA, JACK etc have no probs seeing my various devices and I know they all work with Linux fine but both pavucontrol, kmix and veromix do not let me switch output device reliably so that says to me it is (or was) more likely PA that is (was) broke in this respect. In fact I've not been able to switch output devices with veromix successfully at all so far and it generally seemed a bit buggy to me.

When people talk about Linux audio being crap - this is what comes to mind for me these days. Is there no hope of hot-swap output support ever making it into ALSA?

[Shadow_7]

It's kind of hard to get out of pulse land a lot of the time. I either have to run it or I have to recompile openjdk without it. Fortunately pulse gives us mechanisms to stop running it when we need to. Unfortunately until 3 goes mainstream many software synths have high latency using pulse because the 44.1kHz sound samples will always be resampled to 48kHz with pulse at the point of synthesis.

[tux99]

I always uninstall (as much as possible, a few libraries can't be uninstalled without breaking dependencies) and disable Pulseaudio on all my Linux PCs right after installing or upgrading the OS, I see no reason for using Pulse even on PCs that aren't used explicitly for Music making.

It would be a great step forward if Linux distros stop including Pulseaudio.

[autostatic]

It would be a great step forward if Linux distros stop including Pulseaudio.

And what would the alternative be?

[tux99]

It would be a great step forward if Linux distros stop including Pulseaudio.

And what would the alternative be?

Alternative to what? Pulseaudio is a completely unnecessary layer (it has no use, it just uses up cpu cycles on most typical Linux installs), ALSA is capable of doing software mixing itself and for network audio there are alternatives (I bet less than 0.01% of all users use it anyway).

[autostatic]

I think you're wrong. And I'd like to leave it there. It's a bit pointless to discuss the use of PulseAudio again. It has happened before and there was a clear winner.

[tux99]

I think you're wrong. And I'd like to leave it there. It's a bit pointless to discuss the use of PulseAudio again. It has happened before and there was a clear winner.

Sure you are obviously entitled to your opinion, but it is a fact that for the wast majority of Linux users PulseAudio does nothing, it's just an extra layer where the audio passes through for no reason.