PulseAudio 4.0 Brings Many Changes

[Ericg]

And I thought the primary use case for a sound server is to play sound. Silly me. Do modern audio needs no longer include stutter-free playback of audio?

I'm currently installing PA 4.0 and I'll enable it afterwards. Somehow I doubt my bad experiences from before will be gone but I don't mind getting positively surprised after so many years.

Awesomeness, if its still doesn't work check 2 things for me (and everyone else).

1) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...s_or_crackling

and if you're really adventurous...

2) http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=44862

My old laptop had issues with the sound card -reporting- one buffer size, but wanting and using another, the second link helped to fix that. The first link is the usual cause of audio glitches and high CPU load while using Pulse. But both my desktops and my new laptop all work fine with Pulse with no audio glitches and no high CPU load. So its possible youre hitting bugs in the drivers, or are hitting hardware quirks like I was.

[RahulSundaram]

And I thought the primary use case for a sound server is to play sound. Silly me. Do modern audio needs no longer include stutter-free playback of audio?

I'm currently installing PA 4.0 and I'll enable it afterwards. Somehow I doubt my bad experiences from before will be gone but I don't mind getting positively surprised after so many years.

Modern audio servers have a wide variety of use cases and need to cover all of them well. Just focusing on one thing isn't enough anymore and this is the reason why no mainstream distribution want to just use ALSA and PulseAudio has become a widely adopted default. It is not due to GNOME or lack of choice as you tried to imply.

Stutter in ALSA was actually fixed for my hardware in my previous laptop due to PulseAudio buffering and for some, it has been the other way around due to ALSA driver issues and timing problems. In other words, It doesn't make much sense to talk about it in a generic way with filing and referring to a specific bug report and I haven't seen even one in any of these discussions.

[Artemis3]

I am not trolling anything. I tried a couple of days ago to get Rosegarden to work. It was a serious PITA. On windows I installed Ableton Live and worked without me configuring anything. On both I used MIDI to create sounds. Only on windows the results were good. Rosegarden, ignoring the shitty interface, didn't 'just work'.

And this is the fault of Linux how? Shouldn't you direct your comment towards Rosegarden instead?

Linux is only responsible for Alsa, anything else is third party. Jackd is considered the pro solution, you could try a RT kernel and Ardour instead; try one of the dedicated DAW distros (one coming with Ardour by default).

http://ardour.org/

[ElderSnake]

Interesting discussion in this thread, as you'd expect of anything mentioning PulseAudio lol.

Personally, I use it on my desktop, but not my netbook. So I experience both use-cases to a degree.

I've actually never had an issue with Pulse and it works great for me. In fact in KDE (on my desktop), Kmix now actually supports PA enough now so that it displays sound streams in the popup menu and if you right click on any of the streams, you can hover over "Move" in the menu and send the stream to any of the other sound devices, much like you can in Veromix (which was handy for me, the Veromix KDE applet was getting a bit crashy, so I'm happy with Kmix doing the job). This has been very handy if I want to quickly switch XBMC's stream to my HDMI or switch my Half Life 2 gaming session's sound on-the-fly to my headset when everyone starts going to bed, etc.

So yeah works well enough for me to not have any complaints on my desktop and devices like my USB headset just won't work properly with ALSA's dmix anyway.

On my netbook though, it's internal sound chip works fine with dmix and I rarely have any need to use anything else, and plugging in headphones etc, the netbook's speakers auto-mutes just fine, so I figured I might as well save the CPU cycles on the little netbook and just use pure ALSA. Pulse didn't do anything wrong, I just didn't need it.

[benmoran]

Another happy PulseAudio user here. It's work pefectly for me for years, with several machines. I honestly can't recall a single issue with it, ever. I use the stream redirection almost daily, and can't imagine using my home desktop without it.

I understand that some people have had issues with specific cards or configurations, but some folks talk as if it doesn't work at all. The fact is that it does work perfectly for the vast majority of people. If it doesn't for you, then file a bug report.

[GreatEmerald]

I have a variety of systems I installed PA on. It worked with variable amounts of success on different hardware, so it's very much dependent on the drivers.

On a work Dell PC, it works flawlessly without any issues at all. Same with an Intel laptop that is a few years old, and an HTPC that is also using hardware that is a few years old. On my tablet PC, there is occasionally some crackling, and it might be related to the processor. On an AMD netbook, there is an issue with audio recording, in that recorded audio tends to crackle when microphone boost is set to on. But playback works flawlessly.

Now on my main desktop, I actually have two sound cards: the integrated Intel Azalia one and a dedicated Creative SB X-Fi card. And they both work quite differently. The integrated one never causes me any issues. But the dedicated one, due to poor drivers, sometimes does, when in combination with certain software. If I run VLC with PA using the X-Fi cards for prolonged periods of time, the sound can "explode" into corrupted echoing sound. It gets reset back to normal when I switch the PA profile from stereo to 5.1 and back.

I wanted to report the issue to ALSA, but unfortunately last time I checked their bug tracker was down...

And PA for me is invaluable due to what I need from the sound system. I record games on this machine, so I need to have a system where two independent audio streams are recorded at the same time, one from the sound card's input (microphone) and one from the output (game audio). PA makes this very easy. Per-application volume changes are also very nice to have for me.

And yes, on my desktop I only have 1% processor usage by PA whenever I play music. So if you get more, then there is definitely something wrong somewhere. Maybe PA, maybe ALSA, maybe ALSA drivers, maybe the hardware itself. But if you don't want to dig into the problem, it definitely won't get solved, and others having the same issue will also continue to have it.

[jaxxed]

?? That's worked for me for ages.

Agreed. I can't remember when that was a problem (years?). Then I think most of the time it was solved easily.

[gamerk2]

When I try to output audio to my TV (through my receiver) there is multiple seconds of audio delay. It won't work.

Be careful with TV's; I found most have horrid sample conversion software built in that can easily add a second delay.

For example: If I use dosbox on windows and output at 22KHz, I get a full second delay, easy. If I handle the upsampling to 44.1KHz within Windows, I get no delay. The issue was the TV that was doing the upsampling, apparently with a very poor internal chip. In your case, the receiver might also be doing significant amounts of audio processing, which may also be part of the problem.

It worked oob for me and it's the reason I'm not dualbooting anymore. I used to boot into windows to watch movies on my TV. Now _with PA_ I have a even better user experience than what I had on windows with the ability to move audio streams between different outputs and have different volume levels for them.

Windows can technically support routing to different audio outputs on a per-application basis, but applications rarely allow the user to select a non-default output device. I've been begging MSFT for YEARS to make a program switch to allow the manual selection on a per-app basis, but so far, no luck.

[gamerk2]

If I run VLC with PA using the X-Fi cards for prolonged periods of time, the sound can "explode" into corrupted echoing sound. It gets reset back to normal when I switch the PA profile from stereo to 5.1 and back.

Happens on Windows too, across the entire X-fi lineup. My suspicion is that the X-RAM on the card gets corrupted, but have no way to prove this [I suspect this because when testing with Crysis, the console indicated the audio stream itself was corrupted, so I know it happens BEFORE the output stage]. Was blamed as a PCI issue or NVIDIA nforce problem for a very long time, until Creatives Titanium (PCI-E) started showing the same problems. So I'm guessing your problem is probably not a PA issue, but a Creative driver issue. Not sure why ALSA would act differently, though maybe the way the driver is written is causing the issue to happen more frequently?

Hence why I use C-Media based cards exclusively now (mainly ASUS Xonar branded).

[duby229]

Be careful with TV's; I found most have horrid sample conversion software built in that can easily add a second delay.

For example: If I use dosbox on windows and output at 22KHz, I get a full second delay, easy. If I handle the upsampling to 44.1KHz within Windows, I get no delay. The issue was the TV that was doing the upsampling, apparently with a very poor internal chip. In your case, the receiver might also be doing significant amounts of audio processing, which may also be part of the problem.



Windows can technically support routing to different audio outputs on a per-application basis, but applications rarely allow the user to select a non-default output device. I've been begging MSFT for YEARS to make a program switch to allow the manual selection on a per-app basis, but so far, no luck.

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.