PulseAudio 10 Coming Soon, Using Memfd Shared Memory By Default

[Davidovitch]

[...] in a lot of circumstances pulseaudio is buggy as hell and has a high latency.

I guess that is just based on your limited experience, or for your very specific hardware? Are you sure it is not a driver issue? I have been using PulseAudio for years without any problem whatsoever. For example, I currently use either of the following two USB devices as a sound output: NAD D-3020 or Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. No latency issues whatsoever (neither with gaming nor with video), and I switch effortlessly between USB, on-board, and bluetooth audio using PulseAudio and this handy Gnome3 extension. I use both USB devices with two machines, either a Dell E6530 (i7 3520M) laptop, or my ancient AMD Athlon X2 4850E 2.5GHz desktop. I have even used the Scarlett for recording purposes in combination with Jack (just for the fun of it, PulseAudio also just works) and Ardour, without PulseAudio making any fuss whatsoever (I do not have to remove PulseAudio for that)! See here how to do that (on Arch Linux). I remember the days before PulseAudio, and my god am I pleased those days are just a distant memory.

I rate/evaluate open source software by its performance, stability and usefulness, not by the name of its main/original developer. I couldn't care less who wrote it (apart of being grateful and respectful for their open source contributions!).

[duby229]

I guess that is just based on your limited experience, or for your very specific hardware? Are you sure it is not a driver issue? I have been using PulseAudio for years without any problem whatsoever. For example, I currently use either of the following two USB devices as a sound output: NAD D-3020 or Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. No latency issues whatsoever (neither with gaming nor with video), and I switch effortlessly between USB, on-board, and bluetooth audio using PulseAudio and this handy Gnome3 extension. I use both USB devices with two machines, either a Dell E6530 (i7 3520M) laptop, or my ancient AMD Athlon X2 4850E 2.5GHz desktop. I have even used the Scarlett for recording purposes in combination with Jack (just for the fun of it, PulseAudio also just works) and Ardour, without PulseAudio making any fuss whatsoever (I do not have to remove PulseAudio for that)! See here how to do that (on Arch Linux). I remember the days before PulseAudio, and my god am I pleased those days are just a distant memory.

I rate/evaluate open source software by its performance, stability and usefulness, not by the name of its main/original developer. I couldn't care less who wrote it (apart of being grateful and respectful for their open source contributions!).

At around 60ms or so is when audio latency becomes noticeable for most people, and if you measure it you will see that is about the lowest PA achieves. Almost everyone notices it.

[mdias]

Troll or just stupid? 🤔 gstreamer isnt a replacement for pulse.

The thing that PA still needs is a good variable bit/samplerate machanism. While PA is great, resampling is not cool

Resampling is unavoidable, either in software or hardware. Since hardware resampling (multichannel) is not that common, software resampling is the obvious first step.

Plus, software resampling is flexible and the algorithms can improve. Hardware is "fixed function". Usually software resampling sounds better because it can use very advanced algorithms that would be expensive to implement in hardware.

[pal666]

stop using leannardt software and use gstreamer.

do you know that gstreamer is higher in stack than pulseaudio and gstreamer uses pulseaudio? obviously, you don't know much, but this does not preclude you from posting bullshit

[pal666]

There was tons of hatred for PulseAudio in the Linux community, especially early on.

because canonical wanted to be faster than redhat and shipped broken pulseaudio setup in ubuntu

[pal666]

Good luck using alsa without gstreamer. I never said its a complete replacement.

you said it's a replacement, while it is not. gstreamer is multimedia framework, it has nothing to do with using alsa or pulseaudio

[pal666]

Its easy to know where to point when ALSA just works and pulseaudio does not.

it's not. alsa has large interface, often it "works" in the sense that some methods work, but not ones, used by pulseaudio

[pal666]

Gstreamer is much better than VLC. And ALSA is more than a driver. talk about being not understanding and ignorance.

idiot, gstreamer is a library for using alsa and being used by vlc

[MoonMoon]

... but pottering doesn't care about fixing issues in his software.

Why would you expect him to fix issues in a software he isn't involved in?

[pal666]

People have been saying this same nonsense for years, except I use a cmedia 8188 chipset, which has nearly flawless drivers, and PA latency can be like 1 or even 2 seconds.

you are saying this same nonsense. if pa does not work on your chipset, then you chipset has broken drivers