PulseAudio 0.9.20 Arrives With Fixes

[ssam]

I've never seen such a buggy thing like pulseaudio on linux regular distros.
It's fine people is debugging this stuff, but I think they should not release it till it's stable on 99% of configurations.
.

i'd love to see some real stats on this. it works fine all all my machines. i am sure it works well for the people releasing distros (nobody likes to release code they no is broken).

maybe it does work for 99% of machines. if so then for each million linux users they would be 10,000 grumpy ones complaining.

[misiu_mp]

Err, how about no? Get over it, PulseAudio is the future (and it really is much better than OSS4, plain ALSA or ALSA/ESD).

Whether it is better or not is not the issue. OSS4 is a venerable alternative that would probably be used by many users so it should be in the kernel. Kernel is riddled with features and drivers used by something about 1 user or so. As long as its not in the way for the rest of the kernel and has a maintainer, it should be in the kernel.

[enteon]

As far as I know there are very few, if not nearly none, people having sound corruption with ALSA. But a lot are having sound corruption with PulseAudio, including me.

Why can't PulseAudio at least play any sound without dissortions? ALSA can. PulseAudio could sit on top of ALSA and combine its functionality with the stability of ALSA.

But why? Why not??

[kraftman]

Whether it is better or not is not the issue. OSS4 is a venerable alternative that would probably be used by many users so it should be in the kernel.

Go at lkml with such argument.

Kernel is riddled with features and drivers used by something about 1 user or so. As long as its not in the way for the rest of the kernel and has a maintainer, it should be in the kernel.

Proof this.

[val-gaav]

PulseAudio is the future

Maybe it's the future ... for sure it's not the present as I didn't even try using it yet :P and I'm not going to unless I'm forced by it being default or if people stop posting about their problems with it and I see some gain in using PA...

BTW I'm one of those people happy with ALSA. I see no problems with it...

[misiu_mp]

i'd love to see some real stats on this. it works fine all all my machines. i am sure it works well for the people releasing distros (nobody likes to release code they no is broken).

maybe it does work for 99% of machines. if so then for each million linux users they would be 10,000 grumpy ones complaining.

So if there is 20million linux users, 1% would be 200000 people. And since your 1% is just as good as any other number, what if it actually is not 1% but rather 3% or 5% of users that experience problems. Now, thats about a million users! And you bet they are grumpy, sound is something you expect to just work on desktop these days.


One thing I dont think was tested by the release people is compatibility with closed-source software such as most notably skype and flash.
Even if the fault was in the buggy applications, the sound server should be able to deal with it better.

[misiu_mp]

Maybe it's the future ... for sure it's not the present as I didn't even try using it yet :P and I'm not going to unless I'm forced by it being default or if people stop posting about their problems with it and I see some gain in using PA...

BTW I'm one of those people happe with ALSA. I see no problems with it...

What distro are you using? Did you have to remove pulse? Was it a hassle?

[BlackStar]

As far as I know there are very few, if not nearly none, people having sound corruption with ALSA. But a lot are having sound corruption with PulseAudio, including me.

Why can't PulseAudio at least play any sound without dissortions? ALSA can. PulseAudio could sit on top of ALSA and combine its functionality with the stability of ALSA.

But why? Why not??

PulseAudio sits on top of ALSA. The main issue is that a lot of ALSA drivers are subtly broken (especially Creative ones) - and PulseAudio happens to expose those bugs to the world.

Obviously, PulseAudio is not bugfree. However, most sound corruption issues are caused by buggy ALSA drivers, not Pulse.

Maybe it's the future ... for sure it's not the present as I didn't even try using it yet :P and I'm not going to unless I'm forced by it being default or if people stop posting about their problems with it and I see some gain in using PA...

BTW I'm one of those people happe with ALSA. I see no problems with it...

I really doubt you are using ALSA directly. More likely, you are using an obsolete sound daemon like ESD, which provides about 1/10 the functionality of Pulse and has worse quality to boot.

If you are happy with your current setup, by all means keep it. However, if at some point you try a USB or Bluetooth headset, you'll understand why plain ALSA/ESD is not enough.

Edit: I am happily using Pulse on 3 systems without issues. On my HTPC it is indispensable due to sheer flexibility. On another, I used to have sound corruption issues, but guess what: it wasn't a Pulse issue after all. I updated my kernel and ALSA and the issue was fixed (the updates ship with Ubuntu 9.10, so I'm using that now).

[kraftman]

So if there is 20million linux users, 1% would be 200000 people. And since your 1% is just as good as any other number, what if it actually is not 1% but rather 3% or 5% of users that experience problems. Now, thats about a million users! And you bet they are grumpy, sound is something you expect to just work on desktop these days.

Rather then include some another thing like OSS4 and maintain both architectures I think it's easier to solve some problems in ALSA. Afaik it's enough to install some package to have OSS4.

Imagine if there will be ALSA and OSS4 who'll decide which will be default in distros? They rather won't make OSS4buntu for even 20 million users

[enteon]

PulseAudio sits on top of ALSA. The main issue is that a lot of ALSA drivers are subtly broken (especially Creative ones) - and PulseAudio happens to expose those bugs to the world.

Ok, thank you. So what can I do about it except changing the sound chip? Because in fact I have an Audigy 2 ZS (emu10k1 or something).