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PulseAudio 4.0 Brings Many Changes

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  • #71
    How to use GNOME sound without PA

    Originally posted by Awesomeness View Post
    I have an ancient laptop with on-board NVidia sound. Pure ALSA just works here.



    Sound in GNOME simply does not work without PA, so they don't really have a choice?
    You can in fact use sound in GNOME without PA, I've done it for years. First you need to purge
    Pulseaudio and all the *-pulseaudio packages so as to remove configuration files that can cause
    some applications to default to looking for PA as their sound sink. Pulseaudio libraries can
    remain, some packages are compiled to report them as dependancies. This will set up ALSA
    as the sound default, but also remove GNOME's volume control and disable the PA mixer.

    You will need a new volume control, and a mixer, Volti works very well and provides both. You need
    to add a .desktop file in /usr/share/gnome/autostart or some other autostart directory to start
    Volti at boot. One issue: in gnome-shell, the Volti applet ends up in the system tray, so you need an
    "icons on top" or similar extension to bring back the traditioal tray if you want quick access to it. In
    Cinnamon, IceWM, and other traditional desktops it displays in the tray, you'd never notice anything
    was different about the volume control, even the volume keys work if you press and hold them.

    You used to be able to whitelist Volti for Unity's tray, I don't know if you still can because I stopped
    playing with Unity when the remote search mess started up.

    Needless to day, only hardware mixing works when PA is gone unless you install and use JACK.
    Hardware mixing outperforms software mixing, as usual. On the other hand, if you don't have it
    and can spare the CPU usage, you might be better off keeping PA installed to avoid messes like one
    appication at a time using sound. Some netbooks can't even play a mono soundtrack without
    software mixing-and they are the machines that can most benefit from saving CPU cycles! I
    use JACK in mine, if you don't want to deal with that use PA.

    Comment


    • #72
      Originally posted by duby229 View Post
      I still havent found a single oob experience where PA works. Not one.
      Well then, you can start with my experience. An install of Ubuntu 12.10 which I then upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04. I can't think of any pulseaudio related issues I've had at all. Not one comes to mind. Unless it involves WINE, but that's about it. So there you go.

      In addition, you could at least install an alternate linux distro and multi-boot with your current linux distro. You know, to test how well pulseaudio works on it. It's not all that hard.

      Comment


      • #73
        Originally posted by duby229 View Post
        I'd be interested to hear about your experience after you had sufficient time to play with it. If you would post your "feeling" (your sense about quality) about this version in this thread it would be very cool.
        I enabled the "multimedia" repos from openSUSE which among other multimedia-related upgrades contains PA 4.0. The thing is, after I made a dist-upgrade with that repo enabled, all hell broke loose. Mostly GTK applications but also some others started to weirdly misbehave.
        I have absolutely no idea which upgraded component caused that. After that I disabled the repos and did a dist-upgrade again to downgrade everything.
        Therefore I couldn't test PA 4.0.

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        • #74
          Originally posted by Awesomeness View Post
          I enabled the "multimedia" repos from openSUSE which among other multimedia-related upgrades contains PA 4.0. The thing is, after I made a dist-upgrade with that repo enabled, all hell broke loose. Mostly GTK applications but also some others started to weirdly misbehave.
          I have absolutely no idea which upgraded component caused that. After that I disabled the repos and did a dist-upgrade again to downgrade everything.
          Therefore I couldn't test PA 4.0.
          Obviously that's just some other buggy crap. Well, I guess sooner or later it will get pulled into a stable release.

          Comment


          • #75
            Originally posted by BO$$ View Post
            I don't care about any ideology. I just use what works. Right now for android development Ubuntu seems better suited than windows (mainly because of better terminal). Other than that I use Windows. If I am just browsing it doesn't matter on what OS I am. Most of the software in linux is crap but there are a few good ones.
            As you've said many, many times, the software is crap as well (iirc, the developers are amateurs, or bad professionals), so it doesn't seem like work can be done on it.
            I've seen posts where people have gotten adb working with power shell.
            Also, there's this:
            Windows' built-in command line programs aren't that great on their own. To make them better, we like to use third-party terminal programs, our favorit

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            • #76
              Originally posted by duby229 View Post
              You know I never really thought about that, I think most music is 44.1K and most movies are 48K. I've never really bothered to check. It should just work. Regardless the issue doesnt happen at all when I use Alsa, so same configuration, only difference is no pulse and it works perfectly. So it's not the receiver, it's pulse.

              The fact is that when I don't use pulse everything works perfectly and I like it when everything works perfectly.
              Pulseaudio defaults to 44.1k. You can set it to use 48k by default in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

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              • #77
                Originally posted by duby229 View Post
                Obviously that's just some other buggy crap. Well, I guess sooner or later it will get pulled into a stable release.
                Yes, the multimedia repo is for development. It feeds into Factory.

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                • #78
                  Originally posted by liam View Post
                  I really question why you use linux.
                  You don't seem to like the software.
                  You don't seem to like the ideology.
                  BAM, this is what I call the truth...there are true Windows fanboys pretending to be into Linux but they whine when something doesn't work when they don't know the configuration of it.

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                  • #79
                    Well this is an interesting topic. In this scenario I can see one of two things happening. On one side you have an output and on the other side you have input. In my case the output is a c-media 8770 optical SPDIF. The input is a sony 7.1ch surround sound reciever. What format should the output device be, and what format does the input device expect it to be? In my particular case the sony works with PCM among a few others, I just use PCM. The cmedia card also supports PCM and it seems to work properly with Alsa. I've watched movies that I know are 48K and I've listened to music that I know are 44.1K.

                    So does the output samplerate match the format of the source material, or does the sound card resample it before it gets sent to the output?
                    Last edited by duby229; 05 June 2013, 07:39 PM.

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                    • #80
                      It's just me, or PA 4 has better audio quality than before?

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