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PulseAudio 3.0 Released With New Sound Features

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  • #31
    Originally posted by TheCycoONE View Post
    Since we're saying random things about Pulse that have nothing to do with 3.0 I'll throw in my 2c.

    On my media center, Pulse was a horrible experience that I ended up pulling off. The only way to make it work with my hdmi sound output was to replace the udev detection with loading a module specifically for 0,7 or whatever the proper output was. (HDMI would show up, but it would be trying to use 0,3 or something and not work at all). On top of that xbmc crashed frequently as the sound device would disappear - removed pulse and those crashes went away, and sound was consistent.
    Those problems are almost definitely caused by XBMC itself, and not PulseAudio. The newest releases of XBMC work flawlessly in this regard. I use it myself. In addition to HDMI audio now working without hacking it, XBMC also now supports a few new surround formats by default.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by gens View Post
      "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
      dont compare mp3 music, to flash video from youtube to see CPU usage man...
      you have something broken i can play 10 streams of audio with PA, and my usage is 1% no more

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      • #33
        Originally posted by NomadDemon View Post
        dont compare mp3 music, to flash video from youtube to see CPU usage man...
        you have something broken i can play 10 streams of audio with PA, and my usage is 1% no more
        If you are using Alsa-only and have the ability to play multiple streams on common modern hardware then you are using dmix plugin for software mixing. The software mixing for Alsa-only isn't going to show up the same using things like 'top' when you are trying to compare software mixing for PulseAudio. The cpu usage is still there, but there will be less evidence of it.

        On top of that the software mixing that PulseAudio does is much higher quality then the software mixing 'dmix' plugin does. The audio output is much higher quality. If you can't tell the difference and want to reduce the cpu usage you can choose a different mixing algorithm.

        I believe that resampling-method trivial is the same as what Alsa by itself uses, which is the worst quality one that PA supports.

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        • #34
          Also it's worth pointing out that hardware mixing is still hardware mixing. And don't fool yourself for a second into thinking that the hardware is more sophisticated then the software.

          It terms of audio quality from roughly from best to worst:

          1. 2-channel PCM or multichannel HDMI passthrough
          2. decoded audio out, no mixing. (Pulseaudio decides on the fly if mixing is necessary)
          3. remixed digital/analog out using Pulseaudio
          5. remixed digital/analog out using audio card hardware
          6. remixed digital/analog out using Alsa dmix.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by gens View Post
            the sound quality difference should be unnoticeable, if not the same (probably is the same)

            im just saying for the people who think its any different, that its probably not
            (unless the settings are bad, either in PA or the program using PA/alsa)

            PS i used ladspa, not dmix
            Ladspa is a plugin format... If you were doing any software mixing with alsa it was using dmix.

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