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DragonFlyBSD Decides To Drop PulseAudio

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  • #21
    Originally posted by ypnos View Post
    remembering different gains for different outputs (speaker vs line out)
    Also called the "don't fucking blow away my ears when I connect the headphones, thanks" feature. Yeah, this is crucial for anyone living in 21th century.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by Chewi View Post

      This. Not my experience exactly but surround under ALSA is a total ball ache.
      Same here. The first time my system became usable in regards to sound was when pulse was installed. Before that I was booting into windows to watch movies.
      I bet anyone who claims that plain ALSA is so good and pulse so bad has a setup of a headphone and maybe two speakers and that's it.

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      • #23
        I decided to drop pulseaudio too as it gave me problems, and I'm using linux.
        Basically on the old pentium 4s we have at work none of the newer releases of any distro will give me sound.
        Turns out is a pulseaudio bug, and so, even though this machines can run ubuntu mate, and we prefer ubuntu mate since is more similar to ubuntu 10.04 (the OS we where using before).

        We are actually using lubuntu since is one of the few distros that don't have pulseaudio and so we can have sound.

        And before some idiot come to say "lol update that old shit, is your fault for using old tech". We don't amazing performance on this linux computers, we just need something running linux, and these pentium 4 can still run it, so we still use them.
        So instead of suggesting me to update something we don't need to update, go suggest the pulseaudio devs to not brake stuff that worked before.

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        • #24
          If they ever fix the audio quality issue (or have easy options to fix it) I'll stop calling pulseaudio crap. That's the last show stopping issue it has for me.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by fhuberts View Post
            Argh, my arm itches and hurts.
            Let's cut it off...
            More like an useless appendix, we are now running lubuntu at work because anything with pulseaudio won't give sound, and guess what lubuntu doesn't have, pulseaudio.
            And at my home computer i purged pulseaudio completely and everything still works and gives sound.
            So tell me again how that extra latency is worth if it brakes on older hardware that once where supported.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by ypnos View Post

              Alsa has software mixing since ages. But all the other fancy stuff it hasn't. Including equalizer sink, remembering different gains for different outputs (speaker vs line out) routing applications playing sound from one output to another (like, plugin-in our USB headset and continue listening on them, or continue watching your movie on your TV with sound via HDMI), or tuning the volume of each app separately (like, background music vs other stuff).

              Basically any audio feature of this millenium is lacking from ALSA. And every other major OS has a sound server like Pulse. well, what you don't know, you don't miss.
              Some notes:

              Equalizer:
              PA comes with a global equalizer. Without a global equalizer each app needs its own or you need an external device for that. But.. music player software usually have equalizers, video players have equalizers. It's nice to have it globally, but one can live without. I really like the idea, but I don't like the idea how PA adds to the latency.

              Bluetooth:
              It's a mess without PA

              Multiple sound cards:
              It's a mess without PA. It's really easy to switch on the fly. BUT
              - if you only use a single builtin sound chip or a single USB/PCI(E) sound card, ALSA/OSS can deal with these just fine
              - many devices have a headphone port which switches automatically
              - many sound cards have a switch visible via alsa that controls the headphone output on/off

              Virtual sound cards with n.m channels
              It's a mess without PA. Imagine building a 5.1 setup with Bluetooth speakers. Nice. But I can't figure out how to tune the latency and gain automatically for each channel with PA. These parameters vary quite a bit from device to device. Having 100ms too much latency for back channels isn't acceptable. Take a look at home theater receivers if you wonder how it should work. Hint: it needs a mic. This virtualization should also be easier. How come does it need manual editing of PA configs?

              Audio passthrough:
              It's nice that you have checkboxes for each codec type, but unfortunately it won't work for me. For example my Cherry Trail or Raspberry Pi board won't play anything if I enable AC3 passthrough via HDMI from pavucontrol and in Kodi. I don't understand why. My solution is to disable passthrough on faster devices since they can decode on CPU and I don't use PA at all on RPi which is too slow to decode the audio. It's a nice idea that you can tell what codecs are supported and that the sound manager can control exclusive access for passthrough, but I think this feature has numerous bugs.

              Mixing:
              This is one thing I find problematic in PA. The latency is just too high. For instance when doing karaoke, I get > 10 second latency with PA and USB sound cards. How come? I really like the hardware mixing I had with ALSA and old cards. Actually my SB Live! could even do DSP on chip in the karaoke mode (e.g. echos, chipmunk sound). PA can't.

              Multiroom audio:
              Nice,but.. I used to use ESD. It worked but the latency was huge. OTOH my network was 10Mbps back then. Now I have 1000M full duplex with jumbo frames AND a boatload of audio codecs (lossless) and the latency is almost as bad. How come? Also, by default why doesn't it support broadcasting audio to all local sound cards, but not remote ones. What if I want to broadcast multiroom audio to all rooms at the same time?

              CPU usage:
              This is bad. It's a lot worse with PA.

              Bugs:
              Clicks and pops. Didn't have these with ALSA, now I have with PA. Depends on the system too, but often I need to choose between bad audio quality with builtin chips (even with a digital output, uh).. or high latency with USB DACs. Maybe these are just driver issues.

              Headless systems:
              PA by default doesn't like support this. You need to manually start it. I thought multiroom audio is getting more popular with all the powered bluetooth speakers..

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              • #27
                Hm, btw, the title of the article is an obvious clickbait.

                A more realistic article would have been:

                "DragonFlyBSD Developers Lack the Manpower To Port Linux Stuff Properly So They Decide To Drop PulseAudio"

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by Uramekus

                  pulse works perfectly for all my needs in my destkop and my laptop, well, the last time it was fucking with me was like, 3 years ago.

                  pulse has many features that are nice to the daily user, i hope pulseaudio-in-kernel get back again, maybe it could solve some latencies problems that some people have.


                  btw, i dont like ALSA in any way since OSS was better for me back in the days pulse didnt exist.

                  i remember having a lot of problems like sound for more than 1 application not playing in my headphone, and configuring it wasnt solving in all cases.
                  Dmixing has been around in alsa since I started using it, and beyond that I don't see any benefit to pulseaudio except choppy or noisy audio with increased latency, what's so good about it? Per application volume control isn't much, and I'm sure it could be implemented without all the bullshit crap and bugs that follow pulseaudio.

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                  • #29
                    And since apparently posts can't be edited now for some reason, here's a double post.

                    I've had nothing but problems everytime I try to use pulseaudio and nothing but success with alsa over the past few years since I began using Linux. I always got the impression pulseaudio was trying to fix something that isn't broken, and in turn just makes matters worse. A lot worse (added complexity is not doing anyone any favors here...)

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by rabcor View Post
                      And since apparently posts can't be edited now for some reason, here's a double post.
                      Micheael has disabled edit button because it was being abused by spambots.
                      They were using the same trick we also used to avoid vBullettin's great and very useful "unapproved post" feature, by posting a one-liner, then editing it into spam.

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