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PulseAudio 2.0 Runs On HURD, Has Jack Detection

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  • PulseAudio 2.0 Runs On HURD, Has Jack Detection

    Phoronix: PulseAudio 2.0 Runs On HURD, Has Jack Detection

    Today's certainly an interesting day for some prominent and long-awaited Linux software events. Aside from PowerTOP 2.0, ConnMan 1.0, and the merging of Clover-G3D, PulseAudio 2.0 also made it out the door...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Linux sound stack needs an overhaul. Too many abstraction layers

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    • #3
      Ah. I wonder if microphone input will now work with pulse audio. :-(

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      • #4
        hopefully there are less bugs and that it won't end up making it more notorious than this audio server once was in its early days.
        Are you kidding me?! It is still a horrible mess! I've just tried it 3 month ago.

        Pulseaudio is in many parts duplicating work that is already present in ALSA and doing it worse.

        Pulseaudio should focus on being just an audio server with per application sound levels and network transparency. Also it shouldn't try try manage "every" sound output. Programs that don't directly support it shouldn't be touched by it, that is what creates this mess in the first place.

        While at the same time ALSA should make its advanced settings more easily available. Normalizing, noise cancellation, surround sound, all this is already possible with ALSA it is only hard to write into your .asoundrc we actually need a program that is able to create this file automatically depending on the users preferences.

        I would actually love to have a good sound-server on my Linux boxes, but every time I try Pulseaudio it only creates a mess.
        Last edited by Ragas; 11 May 2012, 03:43 PM.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by bachinchi View Post
          Linux sound stack needs an overhaul. Too many abstraction layers
          We have a problem. Too many layers!

          Solution: Let's invent a new layer!

          New problem: Now we have too many layers plus one more!

          (With credit to XKCD).

          Please, no more "fixes" for Linux audio. Pulse is the best one yet, let us just keep it.

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          • #6
            I've been running 1.99.2 since its release with no trouble so this is hopefully a solid upgrade for anyone already using it.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Ragas View Post
              Are you kidding me?! It is still a horrible mess! I've just tried it 3 month ago.
              Therein lies your problem -- you're "trying" it rather than actually using it. Don't just give it 5 seconds every 3 months and decide you hate it. Confirmation bias: if you go into it disliking it, you're going to hate it no matter what it does.

              Originally posted by Ragas View Post
              Pulseaudio is in many parts duplicating work that is already present in ALSA and doing it worse.
              Nonsense. It doesn't duplicate anything ALSA does. ALSA provides the low-level hardware access; PulseAudio makes it usable. You have no idea what you are talking about. And before you say that PA can do software mixing, don't kid yourself -- dmix is NOT a viable option. dmix is a nasty hack. It has 100 times more bugs than PA; it doesn't even work with half of the ALSA apps let alone anything else! And it has a fixed (high) amount of latency and does not handle dropouts (whole-system / kernel lags) well at all. I've also noticed that dmix tends to interfere with some applications because it does so much "in-process". It basically just tickles a shared memory segment and you'd be lucky if a bunch of applications can "cooperate" on this. Easy to screw it up.

              Originally posted by Ragas View Post
              Pulseaudio should focus on being just an audio server with per application sound levels and network transparency. Also it shouldn't try try manage "every" sound output. Programs that don't directly support it shouldn't be touched by it, that is what creates this mess in the first place.
              It doesn't try to manage anything. It's up to the app if it wants to connect to PA or not. PulseAudio can't help it that ALSA doesn't have built-in software mixing; apps that want to hook into hw:0 are broken by design (not only PA authors agree with this, also the ALSA developers agree with this) because direct hardware access is supposed to be reserved for infrastructure such as PA itself.

              Oh, and most users will want the exact opposite than you: they want all their apps to route through PA so that they can control all the volumes in the same place, and only have to deal with one set of configuration: PA's, which is in a real nice GUI. So distros configure apps so that most apps will play through PA out of the box. This is the right approach IMHO.

              Originally posted by Ragas View Post
              While at the same time ALSA should make its advanced settings more easily available. Normalizing, noise cancellation, surround sound, all this is already possible with ALSA it is only hard to write into your .asoundrc we actually need a program that is able to create this file automatically depending on the users preferences.
              Most of ALSA's "support" for these features is a joke. This code is not really maintained and doesn't work with software mixing, well or at all. Also, in case you didn't notice, having to manage configuration files that are touched by lots of programs is an absolute nightmare. Why do you think X.Org is trying to get people to stop using xorg.conf ? Because it's a mess and it's much easier to auto-detect the right settings and let the user change them at runtime with a GUI. This is why it's very easy to write a GUI to configure your monitors with xrandr, but very hard to write a GUI to configure your screens with xorg.conf (iirc only SUSE still supports that and I think they even deprecated YaST's support for xorg.conf recently... it was called SaX2 iirc).

              Originally posted by Ragas View Post
              I would actually love to have a good sound-server on my Linux boxes, but every time I try Pulseaudio it only creates a mess.
              Only someone who runs an app that is poorly coded to force initializing hw:0 would say something like this. If all you use are apps that are compatible with PA by either using the "Safe ALSA Subset" or PA directly or any of its downstream consumers (openal-soft, SDL, wine, etc), then you have no reason to complain about PA because it "just works".

              If you're still running an app like this, well, stop it! Or tell it to use OSS and install OSS Proxy, which routes through the kernel (CUSE) and back to PA in userspace. But the number of apps that do this is rapidly decreasing these days, and I've stopped needing to do this at all since about 2010.

              Old unmaintained apps need to be dead and buried. The stack is a moving target and the only apps that deserve to be run are those that are maintained and continue to evolve with the stack. Standing still is for proprietary dinosaurs that will soon be extinct.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by bachinchi View Post
                Linux sound stack needs an overhaul. Too many abstraction layers
                I use VLC as playback engine which directly talks to ALSA. It does everything I want just fine. I do not have PA or any sound server in between installed at all.

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                • #9
                  PulseAudio is awesome. One of the best things to happen to the Linux desktop in the last few years, IMO.

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                  • #10
                    Regarding Ubuntu repositories, it's a shame one has to wait or add obscure repos to get new content like new gimp or pulseaudo 2.

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