Michael, one of the things that many of us users consider to be flaky on Linux still is sound. With the immense availability of non-hardware mixing capable sound chips (or at least not with ALSA), especially embedded into motherboards. This might not be considered as "infrastructural" as it actually is, because since the release of kernel 2.6 ALSA became the "backend" for sound in Linux, but Pulse Audio brings to Linux what the Windows Sound System does in Windows or what Core Audio does for Mac. Or at least it tries to. What about a review article of the progress made in Pulse Audio and what can we expect from it in the coming releases of this sound system for Linux? From the start it does look like a more promising sound system than ESD and aRTs have ever been for a number of reasons: Destkop Independent, it could be made to run in text mode (and actually that should be the default behavior), real-time scheduling capabilities, full Policy Kit compliance, small CPU time fingerprint, small memory fingerprint, fast mixing of different sound streams, etc. It looks awesome in paper, but its implementations (on the distros that have actually adopted it) leave some times much to be desired.
Still I think that an article on it and how its progress has been (especially now that Fedora 9 is coming out, and Ubuntu 8.04 has already been released) it would be a good idea to see its evolution in the distributions that have actually incorporated it (Fedora, since 8 and Ubuntu, since 8.04 IIRC) and compare its implementations. What do you think?
One key aspect that still seems to be a problem with PA is sound capture and recording. I'm not aware of any "Pulse Audio compatible" sound recorder, and even direct manipulation of ALSA devices doesn't seem to work when Pulse is running. Maybe you could get word on when can we expect these to work with Pulse from the devs?
Still I think that an article on it and how its progress has been (especially now that Fedora 9 is coming out, and Ubuntu 8.04 has already been released) it would be a good idea to see its evolution in the distributions that have actually incorporated it (Fedora, since 8 and Ubuntu, since 8.04 IIRC) and compare its implementations. What do you think?
One key aspect that still seems to be a problem with PA is sound capture and recording. I'm not aware of any "Pulse Audio compatible" sound recorder, and even direct manipulation of ALSA devices doesn't seem to work when Pulse is running. Maybe you could get word on when can we expect these to work with Pulse from the devs?
Comment