It Looks Like PulseAudio 13.0 Will Be Releasing Soon

[quikee]

PulseAudio, eh? You mean the software that's working fine when you got simple stuff to do, like mixing outputs and inputs from many sources, but completely falls on its tits when you try to use a bleutooth headset that has a microphone?
That happened to me round-about PulseAudio 5. I heard they just disabled bluetooth microphones for shits and giggles back in PA 4 and never turned it back on. Oh Lennart, you prankster.

And fixed then with PA 6.0. Actually AFAIR that was mainly because of the problem with switching to the new bluetooth stack, which didn't yet have headset support in PA implemented.

[rmoog]

PulseAudio, eh? You mean the software that's working fine when you got simple stuff to do, like mixing outputs and inputs from many sources, but completely falls on its tits when you try to use a bleutooth headset that has a microphone?
That happened to me round-about PulseAudio 5. I heard they just disabled bluetooth microphones for shits and giggles back in PA 4 and never turned it back on. Oh Lennart, you prankster.

[UlisesH]

If you're looking for a quick setup for better audio quality on Linux check my Github Repo

https://github.com/andres-jurado/audiophile-linux

[loganj]

@F.Ultra
the hardware works perfectly fine in windows.
the driver might be the problem since its a creative x-fi fatality pro and from what i've learn over the years is that creative does not like linux community too much.
as for the scheduling thing i had no idea about it.
thank you for the tip. ill try it when i'll update my mint cause its already a "disaster" after all the thinks i've done to it in the last year lol

[F.Ultra]

@F.Ultra i know that pulse works greate for a lot of people. Since you didnt have problems lately than you probably didnt google too much about pulse related problems.
i for one have issue with both pulseaudio itsefl - it starts to create noise after a new app starts or with software where pulseaudio does not remember the 7.1 sound corectly - i have to select digital out and back to analog out and again select 7.1 sound.
i can say that the problem with noise with multiple apps i have it also on alsa but its less often than pulse.
also i have no issue with alsa remembering to use all 7.1 channels.
pulseeffect or pulse equalizer is a disaster for pulse cause it will create distortion and eventually that noise ive talk before.
i have no issue with alsa and plug equal

Have your tried to switch from the timer based audio scheduling to the interrupt audio scheduling by setting "tsched=0" in /etc/pulse/default.pa on the dbus line:

.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect [B]tsched=0[/B]
.else

There are still a number of ALSA drivers that cannot properly handle the timer based approach that pulse uses. And when that happens the sounds often distorts so perhaps that is what is happening for you. That you also have noise with pure ALSA however could mean that the driver is very buggy (or the hardware is damaged somehow).

The 7.1 thing can be that the software that you start requests 2.0 from pulse but that is hard to tell without knowing which software we are talking about so I have to guess out of my ass here.

[loganj]

@F.Ultra i know that pulse works greate for a lot of people. Since you didnt have problems lately than you probably didnt google too much about pulse related problems.
i for one have issue with both pulseaudio itsefl - it starts to create noise after a new app starts or with software where pulseaudio does not remember the 7.1 sound corectly - i have to select digital out and back to analog out and again select 7.1 sound.
i can say that the problem with noise with multiple apps i have it also on alsa but its less often than pulse.
also i have no issue with alsa remembering to use all 7.1 channels.
pulseeffect or pulse equalizer is a disaster for pulse cause it will create distortion and eventually that noise ive talk before.
i have no issue with alsa and plug equal

[bug77]

I've been around for decades before that ;-). Ubuntu specifically I've used as my main distribution since their first release back in 2004 (4.10 Warty Warthog).

I was one of the lucky ones, aka I had not a single problem with PA on any of my machines with 8.04LTS and what I wrote in my previous post I also wrote back then on forums since I had decades of experience of software distribution back then (of proprietary software) and I saw it just like how I see it today.

If you ever plan to produce and release a v1.0 piece of software yourself you will also find out the hard way that if you are going to wait until it's perfect you will never have a single release day in your life. I've seen lots of such projects as well during my days.

And I'm 100% confident that if Ubuntu hadn't decided to release PA back in 2008 then we still would have the same audio mess that we had prior to PA, because without the wide spread QA done by the populace it would just never have been "good enough" to release.

I didn't mean to imply it should have been released bug free (it's probably not bug free to this day), just that it need to iron out the most serious issues first.

[pal666]

I hear (pun intended) JACK is still the go-to solution for low latency audio.

because latency is at odds with battery life

[pal666]

I don't think it can be just called a distro failure.

distro's contents is distro's responsibility. there are noone else to blame

[dkasak]

I gave up trying to do any DAW work in linux many moons ago. It just made me too miserable. So I don't know if JACK server still crashes all the time and as a result, every program connected to it has to be restarted. Native linux version of Reaper gives me some hope though. Then again I'm a little worried how the super low latency thunderbolt audio interfaces will ever work properly in linux environments.

Have you looked at Bitwig? No Jack required ( unless you want to bring in LV2 plugins, which you probably won't ), very low latency, amazing UI. As for Thunderbolt ... ewwwww ... stick with USB devices.