"PulseAudio Is Still Awesome"

[Licaon]

Anyway, I heard you guys/gals, I'll reinstall PA and try again, with the Arch conf even. I'll report back.

SO this was it, kinda forced and still not used as default but hey, at least is along side ALSA now: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...220#post830220

[Azrael5]

I've removed pulse audio installed VLC setting audio channel I prefer, and I hear music and play DVD by Xonar d2X.

[profoundWHALE]

My personal pulseaudio story form a desktop user perspektive.

My first, and favourite experience:

♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ KHRKHRKHRKHR ♫ ♫ ♫ KHRKHR

I remember jumping out of my seat. Had I been 60 I probably would have had a heart attack and died right there.

[rudl]

My personal pulseaudio story form a desktop user perspektive.

When pulseaudio was introduced in ubuntu 9.04 it was a nightmare.

-It broke every single availible native linux game like:
doom3 quake4 quakewars quake1/2/3 and also a open source games.
-sound was either stuttering or with really high latency in wine.
-it crashed even on desktop music players video players etc.
-deaktivating it, killing it in the taskmanager, disabling it, uninstalling it well you need to know how to do that, and obvious ways don't really work.

going back to alsa? nope that won't work either because there are just too many problems with dependencys.
using lubuntu which doesn't ship with pulse on default, -> nope dependencys.

Well things got a lot better over the years I have to say, know that i know how to use pasuspender and overall stabiltiy got better, but really from ubuntu 9.04-11.10 pulse was a nightmare, but still even now i occasionally got sound latency issues with wine.
How could someone ship this unstable unfinished piece of *software*? During that time I really used windows a lot because it was just not usable.

Saying "Pulsaudio is awesome" is just wrong on so many levels considering how much troubles i had with it.

[GreatEmerald]

No, I don't mean the channels on the X-Fi, I mean that I also have integrated audio, HDMI audio and a USB microphone, and they all need to cooperate with each other.

[magika]

Well, aplay -l (with PulseAudio) lists 4 devices and 256 subdevices each. So I guess you're right and the wiki is outdated (and last I used ALSA it probably wasn't supported yet). Mind you, I have four audio devices, and only one of them has hardware acceleration, so that's not very useful.

They all *have* hardware acceleration, card is up to 128 hardware voices and those 4 are just presentation of channels for multichannel audio.

[GreatEmerald]

Well, aplay -l (with PulseAudio) lists 4 devices and 256 subdevices each. So I guess you're right and the wiki is outdated (and last I used ALSA it probably wasn't supported yet). Mind you, I have four audio devices, and only one of them has hardware acceleration, so that's not very useful.

[freedom]

Pulseaudio:

+ sound works out of the box
+ portable
+ open source

- latency!!! Skype worked well with ALSA. With PA it is a latency nightmare. We need a "low latency mode". PA wants to save battery, but most people use AC.

[magika]

It does, on Windows. But not on Linux, because nobody worked on the ctxfi driver other than to get it in a basic workable state (it's based on an official Creative driver which was really terrible and nobody really wanted to figure out the details of how it worked).

I don't know why it always worked and currently not. Because with CA20K2 it works. Please post aplay -l without pulseaudio in .asoundrc

EDIT: I checked driver source and its very generic, means every X-Fi card gets 256 voices and 8 channels, if your module is snd_ctxfi you also get this anyway.

[Azrael5]

It does, on Windows. But not on Linux, because nobody worked on the ctxfi driver other than to get it in a basic workable state (it's based on an official Creative driver which was really terrible and nobody really wanted to figure out the details of how it worked).

So this issue depends on alsa developpers... good to know. Where to get a list of sound cards where hardware mixer works on linux systems?

I've to make disappear PULSE AUDIO from my linux operating system, so I prefer to buy an older card rather than to use this piece of crap of pulse audio server.