PulseAudio 3.0 Released With New Sound Features

[gens]

PA has come a long way and may find its place as a fully useful tool

but i remember when it was young, back then putting java as a sound deamon would be of almost the same effect (15% cpu to play a mp3 )

[Hamish Wilson]

Well, thank god for that. Wine audio has been an issue for awhile now.

[gens]

Pulseaudio doesn't copy the data at all...

"In a typical installation scenario under Linux, the user configures ALSA to use a virtual device provided by PulseAudio. Thus, applications using ALSA will output sound to PulseAudio, which then uses ALSA itself to access the real sound card."

thats one copy that dosent occur with alsa, wouldnt occur at all if pulseaudio was kernel-level

hmmm just been reading about how it was desinged
in theory it should be good, and with mr. Poettering orchestrating it it can achieve what it says

but when i see pulseaudio using 5% of my laptops cpu(could be just ubuntu ppl screwing it up again) to play a low sample rate sound from a youtube video, that tells me its either not there yet or its just doing a lot of useless stuff (5% of a cpu is a whole lot, lot more then people today think)

zero-copy is also a kernel thing that glibc can use, but still the page says that PA has a scheduler running all the time
all in all it can never achieve the efficiency of alsa (alsa with a ladspa plugin for a equaliser used ~1.5cpu to play a 44k mp3 on that shitty laptop)


and for all you talking about sound quality, please dont

[GreatEmerald]

Link? I'd love to read what the agreement is, because Ive been waiting for that to happen haha

Here you go:

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10495#c393

Latest thread about it on the Wine mailing list:

http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2012-December/098000.html

(in short, the driver is currently being tested to see if it is good enough already)

[Ericg]

t (finally the out-of-tree maintainer of the PulseAudio driver for Wine and the mainline Wine devs got to a peaceful agreement).

Link? I'd love to read what the agreement is, because Ive been waiting for that to happen haha

[GreatEmerald]

PA support in various programs has improved immensely over the last half a year, even. Just a while ago there were issues with Skype and VLC, but no longer, they are now fixed (and it's actually an issue in those programs triggering some bugs, not PA itself). The only real remaining program that does not work that well with PA is Wine - but even its developers are working towards that (finally the out-of-tree maintainer of the PulseAudio driver for Wine and the mainline Wine devs got to a peaceful agreement).

[Thaodan]

One thing that Ubuntu has done is make it so most "Normal" people (Like my 75 year old mom) can use Linux without issue. Install and go! How many other Linux distros out there provide this? Yeah, thats what I though... NONE!

All this was done by upstream projects and is not distrubtion specific. Ubuntu pushes Linux for non-technic people true but it pushes itself torwards Ubuntu OS and this a greater issue for Linux on the desktop than any other issue.

[Hamish Wilson]

I use PulseAudio on Fedora and have not had many problems. I have played countless games of varying ages, played music, videos, done some video editing, and have used Mumble for VOIP. Never had latency issues, and for the most part things have just worked. And I have used PulseAudio's features to get around problems quite a bit over the past six months. By the way, my computer is hardly a total beast of a machine either.

One thing that Ubuntu has done is make it so most "Normal" people (Like my 75 year old mom) can use Linux without issue. Install and go! How many other Linux distros out there provide this? Yeah, thats what I though... NONE!

How about... almost all of them?

[ShadowBane]

I acknowledge that PulseAudio provides better sound quality, even than better than Windows (this might be subjective).
But Pulseaudio still not working properly. If the USB Headset support is important, so is that their hardware buttons affect the volume of the headset itself and not the master.

The hardware buttons on my headphones just send keyboard style volume down commands that get caught by my desktop environment. I don't think that this is an issue that PA or any other sound system can easily solve. (better to yell at logitech and the other manufacturers to ship linux drivers.)

That being said, the headphones do have a separate master volume than the onboard sound card as they are a second device.

[newwen]

I acknowledge that PulseAudio provides better sound quality, even than better than Windows (this might be subjective).
But Pulseaudio still not working properly. If the USB Headset support is important, so is that their hardware buttons affect the volume of the headset itself and not the master.