PulseAudio Lands Big Improvements For Its Meson Build System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PulseAudio Lands Big Improvements For Its Meson Build System

PulseAudio has been slower than some of the other prominent open-source projects at moving to the Meson build system, but as of last night it appears a bulk of that new build system is in place...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PulseAudio-Meson-Forward

[johanb]

Almost all commits seems to be from Arnaud Rebillout at collabora.

Thanks Arnaud!

[reavertm]

PA has also been slow in rewriting in Rust, just saying..
/sarcasm from primarily CMake user

[Redfoxmoon]

It's strange they haven't stripped out the dependency on libltdl.

[dwagner]

IMHO, the only build system required for Pulseaudio is "rm". On every single newly installed operating system, for many years now, I de-installed Pulseaudio and lived happily thereafter with just using ALSA, after verifying that Pulseaudio still totally sucks, delivers unpredictable results, and is a totally unnecessary pain in the ass.

[Aeder]

On most PCs I had 0 issues with pulseaudio, except when speech-dispatcher (which seems to be a completely abandoned project?) is installed. Then you get crackling on every sound playing once you start something like Discord or Firefox.

And on my new PC it also has that issue with Discord if you don't set the PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 option before running it. I don't know if it's the Realtek chip, the AMD audio chip or pulseaudio having a really bad driver for either one.

[brrrrttttt]

IMHO, the only build system required for Pulseaudio is "rm". On every single newly installed operating system, for many years now, I de-installed Pulseaudio and lived happily thereafter with just using ALSA, after verifying that Pulseaudio still totally sucks, delivers unpredictable results, and is a totally unnecessary pain in the ass.

Has worked fine for years, allows me the effortlessly route audio from each application to the appropriate output device... What exactly are the issues you're encountering?

[tildearrow]

if you don't set the PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 option

Just a question... Is there any way to set the latency in samples? Or does it inherit JACK's latency when you load the JACK sink?

[dwagner]

Has worked fine for years, allows me the effortlessly route audio from each application to the appropriate output device... What exactly are the issues you're encountering?

I had lots of trouble emitting bit-streams (non-PCM) to AV-receivers, and whenever I tried to use audio for more than one user on the system, results were non-deterministic - sometimes a user could output sound, sometimes not at all, some times only after a certain other user emitted sound before... just awful. Also, attempts to configure head-sets for use with VoIP software ended up with having to re-configure the device/output to use like every time, once per call. And for video conferencing, plugging in a second unit of the same type of USB audio device caused the primary device not to be usable upon the next video call... just trouble after trouble, with no useful error messages or diagnostics in sight. I had none of this with ALSA.

[Aeder]

Just a question... Is there any way to set the latency in samples? Or does it inherit JACK's latency when you load the JACK sink?

I have no idea. I haven't worked with JACK, nor am I an expert on PulseAudio.

There's some guides floating around on how to control latency but I don't know how much of it applies to whatever problem you're having: http://juho.tykkala.fi/Pulseaudio-and-latency