PulseAudio 0.9.20 Arrives With Fixes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PulseAudio 0.9.20 Arrives With Fixes

If you have been running into problems with PulseAudio on your system, an update has been made available this morning that you may want to try. PulseAudio 0.9.20 was released and it carries bug-fixes and translation updates, but not much more...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzY5Mg

[blackshard]

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.

BTW a question for who's more informed than me: what's the purpose of PulseAudio? Why ALSA is not enough? Thanks.

[srg_13]

Originally Posted by blackshard

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.

BTW a question for who's more informed than me: what's the purpose of PulseAudio? Why ALSA is not enough? Thanks.

PulseAudio has per-application volume control, some really cool routing stuff (you can seamlessly move a stream from your speakers to a pair of bluetooth headphones, or to another computer, for example), can stream audio over a network, and more...

[thefirstm]

Originally Posted by srg_13

PulseAudio has per-application volume control, some really cool routing stuff (you can seamlessly move a stream from your speakers to a pair of bluetooth headphones, or to another computer, for example), can stream audio over a network, and more...

Seamlessy, of course, not counting all of the pops, clicks, and skipping that PA always causes on most systems.

[n0nsense]

Originally Posted by srg_13

PulseAudio has per-application volume control, some really cool routing stuff (you can seamlessly move a stream from your speakers to a pair of bluetooth headphones, or to another computer, for example), can stream audio over a network, and more...

But, you can't do really simple stuff like using S/PDIF to connect your HTPC to digital receiver.
Actually you can, but try following scenario:
Open Firefox, watch some video (Youtube), read some news after.
Open VLC and play AC-3/DTS movie.
close VLC, go back to FF and try another video ...
ooops, no sound until FF restarted in best case scenario.
Some times it's simpler to reboot computer than to find the stacked program.
Last time i checked, there was no plans to add AC-3/DTS passthrough.

[chaos386]

Originally Posted by thefirstm

Seamlessy, of course, not counting all of the pops, clicks, and skipping that PA always causes on most systems.

As opposed to ALSA dropping audio every time I change the volume? Or how about the old days of using ALSA directly, where one program would hoard hw:0 and prevent anything else from using audio?

Pulseaudio ain't perfect, but neither is any other part of the Linux sound stack...

[niick]

Originally Posted by chaos386

Pulseaudio ain't perfect, but neither is any other part of the Linux sound stack...

True, but pulseaudio is the worst. Both alsa and oss4 are much better, I would personally go for oss due the higher quality (at least to my ears) drivers.

OSS4 should go into the kernel, that should put all this linux audio nonsense to rest.

[BlackStar]

Originally Posted by niick

True, but pulseaudio is the worst. Both alsa and oss4 are much better, I would personally go for oss due the higher quality (at least to my ears) drivers.

OSS4 should go into the kernel, that should put all this linux audio nonsense to rest.

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

[blackshard]

Originally Posted by BlackStar

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

Well, to hear some music I had to stop PulseAudio deleting it's executable...

I always had many problems on many different machines with PulseAudio. It is not mature at all and should not be used in stable distributions IMHO.

[kraftman]

Originally Posted by niick

True, but pulseaudio is the worst. Both alsa and oss4 are much better, I would personally go for oss due the higher quality (at least to my ears) drivers.

OSS4 should go into the kernel, that should put all this linux audio nonsense to rest.

There are many problems with OSS4 (maybe more then with any other thing), so thanks, but no.