PulseAudio 0.9.20 Arrives With Fixes

[panda84]

I for one welcome pulseaudio and devicekit and every abstraction layer that actually brings something useful to the table (so no, I don't welcome Phonon) like being able to to use a bluetooth headset without having to drop to the command line and read lord knows how many man pages and docs till I get my sound working at the precise time I don't need it anymore.

Phonon makes Amarok work on Windows for me:

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=83285&sid=aa540054f5947e7a456381950395f1fa

Nor pulseaudio nor devicekit help Amarok working on Windows.
So yes, I welcome Phonon.

If you can't see what advantages pulseaudio brings to the table you are clearly not looking at the bigger picture.

If you can't see what advantages Phonon brings to the table you are clearly not looking at the bigger picture.

You know: I like to write simple code that automatically supports Xine, Gstreamer, VLC, Mplayer, DirectShow9, QuickTime and whatnot.

[mrlammers]

Err, how about no? Get over it, PulseAudio is the future (and it really is much better than OSS4, plain ALSA or ALSA/ESD).

Future or not, some people just want it to WORK. And I can't blame them.

For me, Pulseaudio is a royal pain in the behind. Although I am sure I can find a workaround, I do not want to "get over it", I want a permanent solution to the problem.

[val-gaav]

so it seems ubuntu just does not package mplayer and vlc frontends ? damn that's too bad...

I guess normal users don't care but I don't like to keep duplicated libraries. It also sucks that gstreamer seems to be dependency of openoffice.org ? Now WTF ? For what is gstreamer needed there I wonder? Too bad I don't see them using phonon, seems I will have to be stuck with gstreamer even if for just one application...

[misiu_mp]

PulseAudio kicks ass. The few cpu cycles it uses are a small price to pay.

To some extend it is true but I have several old 1000MHz machines that would be great as jukeboxes. I would be really disappointed if PA hogged them down.
And what about new low-power machines like mobile phones and MIDs ? Atom might be quite okay, but some devices are powered by much slower, mobile-phone grade arms (200-800MHz).
How many GHz is it supposed to take to play an mp3 nowadays?
Ironically these mobile devices could really benefit from pulse's network streaming capabilities (play your mobile mp3 collection wirelessly on your stereo).

[blackshard]

To some extend it is true but I have several old 1000MHz machines that would be great as jukeboxes. I would be really disappointed if PA hogged them down.
And what about new low-power machines like mobile phones and MIDs ? Atom might be quite okay, but some devices are powered by much slower, mobile-phone grade arms (200-800MHz).
How many GHz is it supposed to take to play an mp3 nowadays?
Ironically these mobile devices could really benefit from pulse's network streaming capabilities (play your mobile mp3 collection wirelessly on your stereo).

Not to mention notebooks where battery power is always a scarce and limited resource...

[ssam]

i think my stats question was misinterpreted. there are millions of linux users. there are hundreds of complaints about pulseaudio. thats far less that 1%.

as for pulseaudio on small embeded systems. how about the nokia internet tablets. they use a distibution called maemo that uses pulseaudio.

in general pulseaudio brings new features (moving streams around, per app volumes, smart global volume, network streaming, powersaving, hot plugging), solves some linux audio problems (people have been have audio issues in linux for the 10 years i have used it), and works for most people.

a good chunk of the issues people do have in PA are actually because it is dredging out all the kludges and bugs of the past 10 years.

do you remember all the hate networkamanger used to get. now the linux wifi stack is cleaned up NM just works.

[misiu_mp]

i think my stats question was misinterpreted. there are millions of linux users. there are hundreds of complaints about pulseaudio. thats far less that 1%.

This should actually be hundreds of *registered* complaints. The actual number of users with problems is probably much larger. Just like with linux users registered at http://counter.li.org/.

asfor pulseaudio on small embeded systems. how about the nokia internet tablets. they use a distibution called maemo that uses pulseaudio.

Good. Unless they optimized it specially for their platform, this means that the hogging is not intrinsic to the way pulse operates and those 'ordinary' systems that seem to be using much more cpu than one would expect when playing mp3s, are victims of bugs. Bugs are fixable so there is hope...

a good chunk of the issues people do have in PA are actually because it is dredging out all the kludges and bugs of the past 10 years.

do you remember all the hate networkamanger used to get. now the linux wifi stack is cleaned up NM just works.

I like your optimism (seriously). It will all be for the best in the end, probably. But the transition period could have been better handled - the buggy drivers anticipated and temporary workarounds and fallbacks implemented.
After all this is supposed to be user-oriented software.

[dextro]

Phonon makes Amarok work on Windows for me:

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=83285&sid=aa540054f5947e7a456381950395f1fa

Nor pulseaudio nor devicekit help Amarok working on Windows.
So yes, I welcome Phonon.


If you can't see what advantages Phonon brings to the table you are clearly not looking at the bigger picture.

You know: I like to write simple code that automatically supports Xine, Gstreamer, VLC, Mplayer, DirectShow9, QuickTime and whatnot.

Gstreamer works on most unix used today and it's already an abstraction layer so I don't see why we need yet another one so I'm sorry but Phonon allowing Amarok to work on windows is the least of my concerns (I think windows already has quite a few good media players).

The work that's being placed into Phonon should be going into GStreamer instead, then we wouldn't need stuff like Xine (i have nothing but gstreamer on my machines and it works fine).

Maemo that has already been mentioned here not only uses PA but also GStreamer.

[panda84]

so it seems ubuntu just does not package mplayer and vlc frontends ? damn that's too bad...

VLC Phonon backend will be released before Qt 4.6, while Mplayer still has some way to go. You can find them in SVN, and will get packaged in the next round of distros:

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=11592&p=83823&hilit=phonon+phonon+backends#p83823

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=11592&p=83823&hilit=phonon+phonon+backends#p83838

[BlackStar]

To some extend it is true but I have several old 1000MHz machines that would be great as jukeboxes. I would be really disappointed if PA hogged them down.
And what about new low-power machines like mobile phones and MIDs ? Atom might be quite okay, but some devices are powered by much slower, mobile-phone grade arms (200-800MHz).

As another poster mentioned, Nokia phones can handle PulseAudio just fine.

How many GHz is it supposed to take to play an mp3 nowadays?

About the same as when you are using plain ALSA/ESD.

You'll pay the costs of software mixing no matter which sound server/daemon you are using. The difference is that PulseAudio gives you a choice between performance and quality. Want better quality? Activate a better resampling algorithm. Want to trade quality for speed? Use a faster resampler. Lower latency? That too.

You don't need GHz, this is stuff even a 33MHz 486 can handle. A newer CPU will simply give you higher polyphony, lower latency and (much) better quality.

What next, people will start griping that mouse clicks are eating too many CPU cycles and that they'll try to disable them "because many people have problems with them".