"PulseAudio Is Still Awesome"

[Calinou]

PulseAudio is good, exactly because it meets the needs of advanced users. Some people happen to do all this at once:

- play 4 sound sources (Web browser, VoIP, a game, music player) at once with different volumes
- use a 5.1/7.1 USB headset
- use HDMI sound or multiple devices at once

[magika]

It appears that you just want to declare features you don't need as unnecessary complexity. That doesn't negate the fact that users do need them and ALSA doesn't support them out of the box if at all. Hence the requirement for PulseAudio and use of it by pretty much every major distribution.

More like specific features. If you dont want degradation in quality and simply want to control volume and pass audio to HW for mixing you don't need to stack alot of audio systems on top of each other. But of course when user wants some specific feature like low-latency audio he uses Pul... I kid! Pulseaudio can't do that so user employs JACK.

[gens]

PulseAudio is good, exactly because it meets the needs of advanced users. Some people happen to do all this at once:

- play 4 sound sources (Web browser, VoIP, a game, music player) at once with different volumes
- use a 5.1/7.1 USB headset
- use HDMI sound or multiple devices at once

of desktop users
advanced would be DJs and audio engineers

you can do all that with alsa, except different volumes
tbh if you use an music player that cant set volume, then yea, sure

[Licaon]

On Debian Sid ( I won't switch to Fedora any time soon 10q ) it's the default yet I can't have sound in more than one app at once, believe me a tried to follow all the guides, to no avail.
Also none of the pavucontrol / manager apps actually registered any sound or app being used, no mpd, no Opera ( flash / html5 ), no mplayer, no sdl2 game, nothing.

[Veto]

But of course when user wants some specific feature like low-latency audio he uses Pul... I kid! Pulseaudio can't do that so user employs JACK.

Do you have any data to back up that claim? I ask because I might be interested in doing some low latency audio stuff.

[RahulSundaram]

More like specific features. If you dont want degradation in quality and simply want to control volume and pass audio to HW for mixing you don't need to stack alot of audio systems on top of each other. But of course when user wants some specific feature like low-latency audio he uses Pul... I kid! Pulseaudio can't do that so user employs JACK.

Calling a feature specific is meaningless. Every feature is specific including low latency audio and if I want Jack and install it, PulseAudio hands over control just fine.

[fritsch]

Yea its really great. The only downside is that to use your app user has to install PA on his machine and configure it so that it wont hijack ALSA device.

Mmh. That's full wrong. We don't need PA to run. If context does not open -> ALSA is used.

[GermanyChris]

The internet nerd rage/I hate Poettering aside I like PA.

[89c51]

Pulse might be great and stuff but the damn fact that we still have to use two different servers depending on use still makes Audio in Linux suck.

Of course this needs work and no company cares much about linux audio at the moment to get this thing sorted.

[Krejzi]

On Debian Sid ( I won't switch to Fedora any time soon 10q ) it's the default yet I can't have sound in more than one app at once, believe me a tried to follow all the guides, to no avail.
Also none of the pavucontrol / manager apps actually registered any sound or app being used, no mpd, no Opera ( flash / html5 ), no mplayer, no sdl2 game, nothing.

I think I won't be wrong if I say that this is Debian specific issue. On Archlinux, you have pulseaudio-alsa package that installs a configuration file for alsa that makes alsa apps use pulseaudio so pulseaudio will be "owner" of the sound device. I suppose all of the apps you mentioned use ALSA, not pulseaudio.

Adds a bit of complexity, but that way nobody will fight over a write access to a sound device.

Without such config file, both pulseaudio and alsa may try to open the sound device at the same time and only one will succeed, thus you'll only have sound from the app that was "faster" to grab the device.