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  • There is still some problematic software out there though unfortunately. And it's not surprising those projects don't work well with it when you have the developers making comments along the lines of "works with ALSA, not with Pulse. Pulse sux and it's only Pulse's fault." With that kind of an attitude it's no wonder their software doesn't play well with it. Even if it requires some re-architecting of their app it'd be nice if they'd have a fair dinkum go at fixing what they can instead of calling for yet another major upset and re-architecting of the Linux audio stack instead.
    The question is, why should they care. If it requires X hours of work for things they don't use nor care about, where's the motivation?
    Also, your quoted comment doesn't ask for another major upset, it asks for the removal of the most recent upset.

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    • Once again, I'm not in favour of immediately removing ALSA in favour of OSSv4. I'm only in favour of pushing it into the repos of distros so it can be developed further.

      I do believe Pulse needs to be removed immediately because it does break games and it does break programs. Recoding everything to be tolerate of a wrapper is not an option. Removing the wrapper and integrating its functionality into the core sound API is the only way to go.

      If this can be done with ALSA, sure let's stick with ALSA. But I'm not sure if it can.

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      • Originally posted by Mo6eB View Post
        Besides, you will never ever be able to support every linux configuration under the sun. We love doing things our way and being different, that's part of the fun. Just supporting the latest ubuntu LTS is enough - your game will "just work" on most computers and everybody else probably knows what they're doing and won't mind editing some configuration.
        Careful there. Ubuntu LTS isn't the whole sum of Linux. You've just tripped yourself up if you're trying to provide a commercial game or similar. No, you're not going to be able to support every system- but your thinking you're espousing isn't the answer either.

        Just get your game out - we'll get it to run, then we'll tell everybody how we got it to run. Perhaps you could release a patch to support the odd corner-case we hit, while trying to run it. Or you could decide it's not worth it - that's still cool. As long as I have a game.
        Ah... But what if you've pinned your libc ABI versioning and something like Pulse pulls in one of your forbidden symbols? You end up with a game that only the people that don't have that version of Pulse in their system, and so on and so forth. I know about this one from professional experience. And it can happen with distributions other than Ubuntu- and not just Gentoo or Arch either.

        More to the point I'm getting to here, the BULK of the potential userspace aren't hardcore tech geeks. They just want to have it drop in and work. Heck, I don't have the time to tinker around like you're implying or to wait for someone else to do it for me- it'd better mostly work out of box. And with PulseAudio, it DOESN'T. Raw ALSA or OSS often does better with things than PA does- now the claims of poor implementation and execution on the part of the distributions (Ubuntu, by the by, was one of the guilty parties there...) may be legit, but it implies there's some complexity we don't need.

        AND it does inject latencies in the mix that aren't there with the lowe level stuff. Seriously. You're adding a dispatch layer on TOP of everything else to support per-application level mixing of sounds and network redirection. It's going to add latency in there that isn't there with the raw, low-level stuff.

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        • Originally posted by curaga View Post
          Also, your quoted comment doesn't ask for another major upset, it asks for the removal of the most recent upset.
          Or at least a correction of the previous one so you don't need the most recent one...

          We're looking at approximately 12+ years (yes...) of trying to get it right and missing the mark on sound here. Three differing failed attempts (including OSS, when you get to brass tacks here...) to get it right on Sound. At least with 3D, you've largely had the same API interfaces for things, back from when Utah-GLX was the thing, all the way to now. With sound, you've had this hodge-podge of things that offer sort of OSS interfaces, sort of ALSA interfaces, etc.

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          • Originally posted by darkphoenix22 View Post
            If this can be done with ALSA, sure let's stick with ALSA. But I'm not sure if it can.
            It's almost been done with ALSA, so I'm not wholly sure WHY we needed PulseAudio to begin with- unless the DMix stuff's hopelessly broken for whatever reason (which implies a re-work of that, and not doing yet another layer on top of things...).

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            • I would like to see an analysis on how much work it would take to get ALSA to support these features.

              The OSS dev has been pretty clear about what needs to be done and how much it would cost:


              I would be in favour of whatever economically costs less.

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              • Originally posted by darkphoenix22 View Post
                I would like to see an analysis on how much work it would take to get ALSA to support these features.
                As would I.

                The OSS dev has been pretty clear about what needs to be done and how much it would cost:


                I would be in favour of whatever economically costs less.
                As would I- however, there's politics involved (as there were (it wasn't all technical reasons motivating the move of OSS vs ALSA back then...there was a LOT of politics involved from at least one of the mainline distributions of the time with the move...) and Hannu's not really popular with the crowd that is in charge with the Linux Kernel right at the moment...) so you need to factor that into your thinking as well.

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                • I just don't want to drive away game developers because of Linux's mess of a sound system.

                  I'm tired of politics driving Desktop Linux development.

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                  • I still don't know why it's a mess.

                    Mixing works perfectly here, with as many streams as you want, at different frequencies, with binary crap such as Adobe Flash, and anything I've ever thrown at it.

                    If it doesn't work for someone, then it's a buggy driver and you need to file a bug.

                    The per-app volume is a thing that sometimes works and sometimes not. I agree that it should be fixed.

                    Other than this, I see NO advantage in switching back to OSS.

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                    • Because on many distributions, especially the popular ones, games will be broken out of the box due the latency introduced by wrappers and abstraction.

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