From my perspective I feel Pulseaudio is good for those that do not have hardware mixing audio cards. Software mixing is the only thing PA brings to the table from my perspective.
I might be one of those creative junkies but there are other cards out there that use hardware mixing. I would also like to point out that comparing audio quality from my X-fi to the onboard Intel or c-media or whatever it is, to me sounds the same.
Without PA I am able to play all my games and listen to the in game music. I usually turn of in game music though. I have just the sound effects turned on as music usually hinders those audio que's that you are listening for when someone is just around the corner.
At the same time though, I can use mumble or Teamspeak at the same time while playing my music from Amarok or some other audio player.
The one main advantage I see to not having PA. Especially on a gaming rig, is that I can play all Linux games without issues. If I am to use PA and play a game like UT or Rune for example I either get no audio or I get a delay of 1-5 seconds from the audio. That in a gaming environment is completely unacceptable. Audio que's are very important in gaming so the faster I hear something the faster I can react or plan to react to a situation.
In the end, great that Chrome is supporting PA now for those that don't have the 30-60 bucks to put into a hardware mixing card. Or those that don't run a gaming Linux PC. But I do hope that developers never go so far as to put PA only in their programs with no oss or alsa interface. When this starts to happen I will be forced back to the windows realm. Where as I am already forced to use Gentoo or Arch so I m not forced to use PA. It's not a bad thing I just prefer Fedora but have not been able to use it with games since fedora 12 for audio reasons.
I might be one of those creative junkies but there are other cards out there that use hardware mixing. I would also like to point out that comparing audio quality from my X-fi to the onboard Intel or c-media or whatever it is, to me sounds the same.
Without PA I am able to play all my games and listen to the in game music. I usually turn of in game music though. I have just the sound effects turned on as music usually hinders those audio que's that you are listening for when someone is just around the corner.
At the same time though, I can use mumble or Teamspeak at the same time while playing my music from Amarok or some other audio player.
The one main advantage I see to not having PA. Especially on a gaming rig, is that I can play all Linux games without issues. If I am to use PA and play a game like UT or Rune for example I either get no audio or I get a delay of 1-5 seconds from the audio. That in a gaming environment is completely unacceptable. Audio que's are very important in gaming so the faster I hear something the faster I can react or plan to react to a situation.
In the end, great that Chrome is supporting PA now for those that don't have the 30-60 bucks to put into a hardware mixing card. Or those that don't run a gaming Linux PC. But I do hope that developers never go so far as to put PA only in their programs with no oss or alsa interface. When this starts to happen I will be forced back to the windows realm. Where as I am already forced to use Gentoo or Arch so I m not forced to use PA. It's not a bad thing I just prefer Fedora but have not been able to use it with games since fedora 12 for audio reasons.
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