PulseAudio Adds Memfd Transport Support

[nanonyme]

I'm amused by the wording "relatively secure" mainly

[haagch]

I think you're the one who is misguided. Pulse eats bits to do completely unnecessary software mixing on everything. You can find music players which have options to pass through to alsa directly (and you wont get the degradation) and that's actually when I discovered why my music sounded so bad on linux vs windows.

What about alsa's dmix? Does it degrade too?
If you have hardware mixing, can't you just have pulseaudio and your music player running at the same time?
If you don't have hardware mixing, why not just use pasuspender, since your other programs won't be able to play sounds anyway?

[pal666]

While this is neat, I'd prefer if they fixed some basic issues

if you need your bugs to be fixed for you, you have to hire someone

[pal666]

why do people like pulseaudio?

because it just works

Edit: It should be noted that using a fully up to date Arch I don't have that particular problem with that particular program anymore. But due to the issues mentioned I remove it from all of my machines now anyway.

so you had broken distro but you prefer to remove perfectly working software instead. why not distro? it seems that pulseaudio is only hated by crazy people

[Ericg]

Can you actually use ALSA with multiple programs at once without special hardware?

Alsa does have dmix. I don't know about its reliability or quality though, havent used it in years.

[duby229]

Whoever told you that has misguided you. PulseAudio does not devastate audio quality, and I should know as I use audiophile headphones with a dedicated DAC and AMP. If the source sound is the same frequency as your output, PulseAudio doesn't manipulate it in any way. Any issues you are experiencing with your setup is not caused by PulseAudio but a very poor ALSA driver. Pulseaudio simply makes it easier to notice these ALSA bugs because it puts stress on the ALSA driver.

That's not exactly true. You blame ALSA for the fact that PA uses the interface in ways that ALSA isn't designed to handle. There is nothing an ALSA driver can do about it. It's loooong past time that a new audio interface was designed from the very beginning for both a kernel component and a userspace component.

[pal666]

as in example all the other such programs never had (see JACK)

jack isn't such program. it doesn't fulfill same role as pulseaudio, so any comparison is stupid
here is a little education for you http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/whe...-when-not.html

[jrch2k8]

PA does use a good resample, the ffmpeg one

not that anybody would notice the difference (not even you with your fancy headphones)

the crackling with PA is due to how it "manages" latency, that has absolutely nothing to do with the ALSA drivers

if PA was made properly from the start it wouldn't have any problems with alsa drivers, as in example all the other such programs never had (see JACK)

whoever told you anything is misguided

on topic:
this is a stupid idea.
there is nothing wrong with ringbuffers, while this adds overhead for absolutely no benefit.
not to mention the complications coming from poorly written clients, that ringbuffers just don't have

1.) I agree
2.) Some people can, some people don't this is very relative
3.) Never happened to me ever, not with my old xonar, sb live, or the myriad of crappy integrated cards in the intel/AMD boards(760, 880g,970, g41, b85). (To OP in case it applies)Would be interesting instead of whine here you could open a bug report with your precise hardware because using your own logic, if nobody is getting this but you(i can guess few others) then the problem is located in your machine.
4.) This is arguable since JACK and PA fit quite different usercases and ovbiously this require different approaches
On topic:
1.) memfds have no overhead and are actually way faster than any for of SHM allocation(that currently uses btw) and allow zero copy
2.) The "relative secure" term is refered to the fact memfds can be sealed(aka no writes or size change), hence are safe to pass around because cannot be modified but is not ACL or something like(no SHM have neither)

[pal666]

if A works perfectly

but it doesn't
it has featureset of cavemen

[sjukfan]

Can you actually use ALSA with multiple programs at once without special hardware?
I'm never gonna move away from PulseAudio if I can't get all my programs to work with its audio AND have multiple applications that can run at once.

I think this is some old story that lives on long after it's been fixed. I haven't had any problem with this in the last five six years and I only use alsa with whatever soundcard that comes on the motherboard. In Debian Lenny back in 2009 I had to do some trick to initialise the it but since 2010 it's been just plug and go.