Memfd Transport Now Enabled By Default For PulseAudio

[Guest]

PA 9.0 comes with Memfd? Oh boy, can't wait to go try- (Ubuntu only ships 8.0)...

Now I'm reminded as to why I left Ubuntu a while back

[Delgarde]

You may forget that before Pulseaudio, you were lucky to sometimes have sound sometimes. These days, audio (with the exception of JACK/low latency unfortunately, which is still a nightmare), is entirely plug and play, regardless of whether the app was designed for KDE, Gnome or others

That's a bit of an exaggeration - sound worked fairly well, as long as you weren't doing anything complicated. But these days, we *do* do complicated things - we want to use Bluetooth or USB headsets, we want to make voice calls to friends and record both inbound and and outbound channels to the same output file, we want to be able to mute one app while letting another play. While not perfect, Pulse made all of those things easier.

[cynic]

Doesnt matter I still hate pulse audio. Before this crap came I never had any issues with sound, now still have some suddenly 100% volume on notification problems.

don't know how many years you have been using GNU/Linux, but my experience is exaclty the opposite: PulseAudio solved a lot of audio issues for me. Before it came the audio stack was really a mess. (and it still is, but al least, PulseAudio is hiding that mess to my eyes )

[Chewi]

The most annoying thing with Pulseaudio and multiple sound cards is, if I close all streams, the sound sink selection disappears as the streams disappear from pavucontrol. Now, when I start playing audio again, I don't know which sound card it will use. It's sometimes super annoying that you don't know which sound card is being used and also there's no simple sink selector applet (xfce) for the task bar like in OS X. The xfce mixer isn't pa compatible.

You can select the default sink in the Output Devices tab. This is a complaint about pavucontrol anyway, not PulseAudio itself.

[jo-erlend]

That's a bit of an exaggeration - sound worked fairly well, as long as you weren't doing anything complicated. But these days, we *do* do complicated things - we want to use Bluetooth or USB headsets, we want to make voice calls to friends and record both inbound and and outbound channels to the same output file, we want to be able to mute one app while letting another play. While not perfect, Pulse made all of those things easier.

Well, I remember things like leaving Totem or Rhythmbox paused in the background meant you couldn't get sound in Firefox or vice versa. I wouldn't call that doing something particularly complicated. You could get used to it and then it wasn't a very big problem, but it certainly wasn't user friendly.

[cj.wijtmans]

Well, I remember things like leaving Totem or Rhythmbox paused in the background meant you couldn't get sound in Firefox or vice versa. I wouldn't call that doing something particularly complicated. You could get used to it and then it wasn't a very big problem, but it certainly wasn't user friendly.

why did i never have such issues on kde with alsa? gstreamer?

[Auzy]

That's a bit of an exaggeration - sound worked fairly well, as long as you weren't doing anything complicated. But these days, we *do* do complicated things - we want to use Bluetooth or USB headsets, we want to make voice calls to friends and record both inbound and and outbound channels to the same output file, we want to be able to mute one app while letting another play. While not perfect, Pulse made all of those things easier.

Not really.. If you installed multiple desktop environments and switch between them, you often have to swap the sound server all the time in the apps. Often, 2 different apps would use 2 different sound servers and you'd lose audio in one app. And don't even get started on gaming.

And when the sound servers blocked each other, often apps would crash, or you'd hear 3000 sounds after you quit the app blocking the sound server which are queued up...

It's not a case of doing complicated things. Its a case of shared audio rarely working.. Often though, people forget this...

[Hi-Angel]

Can anybody recommend interesting development blogs about PulseAudio? E.g. like Who-T's about libinput, or Graesslin's about Plasma. I found "pulseaudio planet", but it rather looks like a gathering of tutorials.

[Hi-Angel]

Can anybody recommend interesting development blogs about PulseAudio? E.g. like Who-T's about libinput, or Graesslin's about Plasma. I found "pulseaudio planet", but it rather looks like a gathering of tutorials.

Okay, I probably found one https://arunraghavan.net/blog/

[DanL]

Well, I remember things like leaving Totem or Rhythmbox paused in the background meant you couldn't get sound in Firefox or vice versa.

I'm guessing you either didn't have dmix setup properly, or you had gstreamer/gnome apps using esd and then esd and dmix competed for control of your soundcard.