Wine Developers Fight Over PulseAudio Driver

[Kano]

It is just a bit tricky to use pulse when the hdmi device is not at ,3. Like when you have got some nvidia gfx cards one output is often ,7 and the other is ,3.

[bwat47]

I can understand all this hate towards pulseaudio, since I used to hate it aswell...

My first pulseaudio experience was on the first Ubuntu that included it by default (I think 9.04 but I might be wrong), and yes, it was really awful. Stuttering sound, crackles, high latency, lots of apps not being able to output audio with default settings, very high CPU usage (over 50% to play 2 streams) so yeah, I immediately removed it every time after a fresh install, and yet it was not easy as GNOME was seeming to highly depend on it.
I hated it, verily. I also thought that another layer like this was useless and only causing troubles...

So I passed years, only using bare ALSA and fled on KDE 4 just because of pulseaudio becoming more important in GNOME (like replacing the old standard esd). I also finally moved to Archlinux and some day after reading pulseaudio 1.0 release news, I decided to try it, as I'm curious...
The result was just totally different. Not only my sound quality and maximum volume vastly increased, but it was just flawless even under heavy load. I could also finally use some more features of my dedicated Creative X-Fi card such as 96khz/32bit output, tune the resampling quality, per-app volume/recording/routing/piping to what-so-ever, things that are just totally impossible or very user-unfriendly with bare ALSA/dmix.

I also learnt more about pulse, like why it used to have a lot of issues at the beggining.
As pulseaudio is way more feature complete than dmix, it uses some functions/APIs that weren't used nor tested at all in the ALSA drivers previously, and many of them were bugged or simply broken/missing. Pulseaudio highlighted a ton of existing bugs in ALSA drivers that weren't noticed yet and as the drivers were broken pulseaudio was working bad on them.
Would you blame X if the display is corrupt because of a bad driver ? I don't think so.

Times passed, and a lot of these issues have finally been resolved. PA works seamlessly on most of the hardware nowadays, and if not you can still configure it to use the old interrupt-based method which should work for the still-problematic drivers...
Of course, ALSA drivers aren't the only ones to blame for most of pulseaudio's misconceptions, but also some distros and/or some desktop environments that enforced it while it was still not complete and working on bugged ALSA drivers, making a lot of users, including me, blaming pulseaudio even if the broken pieces were elsewhere...

So I understand people hating pulse, but I really encourage them to try a recent version, because it has really changed and matured. Don't hate or troll on it just because you lastly tried an old version of it on broken ALSA drivers.

Regards,
(Sorry for the wall of text and bad english)

I agree, for me pulse is a FAR FAR FAR better experience than plain alsa/dmix. I am getting better sound quality, and stuff like my HDMI output just works (had to use freakin scripts to get it working with alsa/dmix, and even then volume control didn't work. alsamixer refused to show the hdmi device, even in the f6 menu).

Pulseaudio actually fixed the only remaining bug I had with it (sometimes it would stop working and tell me I had a dummy output until I restarted pulse. Works with no issues with pulseaudio 2.0)

[Bestia]

I've tried it in Ubuntu 12.04 which has pretty up to date versions of both PulseAudio and ALSA. I ended up removing it because of problems under heavy load. While I had pretty all of my RAM in usage and high CPU use audio stream was stuttering and even disappearing for long periods of time.

[Scias]

I can understand all this hate towards pulseaudio, since I used to hate it aswell...

My first pulseaudio experience was on the first Ubuntu that included it by default (I think 9.04 but I might be wrong), and yes, it was really awful. Stuttering sound, crackles, high latency, lots of apps not being able to output audio with default settings, very high CPU usage (over 50% to play 2 streams) so yeah, I immediately removed it every time after a fresh install, and yet it was not easy as GNOME was seeming to highly depend on it.
I hated it, verily. I also thought that another layer like this was useless and only causing troubles...

So I passed years, only using bare ALSA and fled on KDE 4 just because of pulseaudio becoming more important in GNOME (like replacing the old standard esd). I also finally moved to Archlinux and some day after reading pulseaudio 1.0 release news, I decided to try it, as I'm curious...
The result was just totally different. Not only my sound quality and maximum volume vastly increased, but it was just flawless even under heavy load. I could also finally use some more features of my dedicated Creative X-Fi card such as 96khz/32bit output, tune the resampling quality, per-app volume/recording/routing/piping to what-so-ever, things that are just totally impossible or very user-unfriendly with bare ALSA/dmix.

I also learnt more about pulse, like why it used to have a lot of issues at the beggining.
As pulseaudio is way more feature complete than dmix, it uses some functions/APIs that weren't used nor tested at all in the ALSA drivers previously, and many of them were bugged or simply broken/missing. Pulseaudio highlighted a ton of existing bugs in ALSA drivers that weren't noticed yet and as the drivers were broken pulseaudio was working bad on them.
Would you blame X if the display is corrupt because of a bad driver ? I don't think so.

Times passed, and a lot of these issues have finally been resolved. PA works seamlessly on most of the hardware nowadays, and if not you can still configure it to use the old interrupt-based method which should work for the still-problematic drivers...
Of course, ALSA drivers aren't the only ones to blame for most of pulseaudio's misconceptions, but also some distros and/or some desktop environments that enforced it while it was still not complete and working on bugged ALSA drivers, making a lot of users, including me, blaming pulseaudio even if the broken pieces were elsewhere...

So I understand people hating pulse, but I really encourage them to try a recent version, because it has really changed and matured. Don't hate or troll on it just because you lastly tried an old version of it on broken ALSA drivers.

Regards,
(Sorry for the wall of text and bad english)

[allquixotic]

Maybe it is time to rip out the audio stack and start over, with all the stake holders and get this right, just as we're doing with the graphics stack.

Audio is easier than graphics?

Every time anyone tries to "rip" anything, they just end up adding more fragmentation. The people using the old system for existing applications aren't going to just stop using those applications because you think you made something better.

[Artemis3]

I dont have any problems with pulseaudio. Never had. Only problems were caused by alsa itself.
I really miss alsa controls, with pulseaudio, kmix is so empty...

You can still use alsamixer, i often do, load it then press f6 and pick the alsa device. Maybe kmix allows to change the device as well. Otherwise you can use pavucontrol.

[Artemis3]

These babies are Ubuntu people. You can spot them easily even if they don't resort to such bad language.
They think that Linux is that thing they've been using a bit and try to argue even if they have no references.

You cannot be more wrong about this. Read the Code of Conduct, and learn why the people in the forums and IRC behave. Ubuntu is one of the few communities where "rtfm" is forbidden, if you are going to talk, it's to help, otherwise stay quiet. This was made in a time where the typical community response to end users was "don't waste my time", etc; and is still the reason why the ubuntu community remains one of the biggest, with many non ubuntu users trying to sneak and get support because in their linux communities there is no help at all (learn on your own, etc).

Incidentally, about 2 years after ubuntu implemented pulseaudio, all problems in my machines were gone. I don't remove it because it works, and it works well; in wine, and even with an old eee701 (pentium m, 630mhz...).

Pulseaudio does far more than dmix, but its beyond the topic of this discussion. If the quality of the proposed wine pulseaudio code is not good, i hope something else eventually comes and gets accepted. Don't see the drama in that.

[spstarr]

If we can replace graphics stack....

Maybe it is time to rip out the audio stack and start over, with all the stake holders and get this right, just as we're doing with the graphics stack.

Audio is easier than graphics?

[GreatEmerald]

Veromix is too unstable. Too many visual glitches (maintaining its size, alignment issues)

That's odd, since I never had any of those problems. The only issue I've had with it is that it sometimes fails to load, but removing the icon and putting it back up usually solves that, too... So I guess that problem has something to do with either the distro you're using or some configuration gone wrong.

[linux5850]

Under pulseaudio video audio easily gets out of sync

Under pulseaudio video audio easily gets out of sync but under alsa audio is always in sync. Why is that?

Tried jack driver but jack routing not easy. At least pulseaudio does the routing well.