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> PulseAudio I abhor PulseAudio, because it just doesn't work as smoothly as JACK or ALSA. Sometimes learning a new thing isn't necessary, as the old ways of d

> PulseAudio I abhor PulseAudio, because it just doesn't work as smoothly as JACK or ALSA. Sometimes learning a new thing isn't necessary, as the old ways of doing something still hold. I agree with the BSD way of doing this: force it on the users and try and help them come to terms with your changes. If there's a revolt and/or it's too much work for you, revert. Otherwise your entire ecosystem is safer.

throwaway7767 11y ago
In my experience, most of the problems people have with PulseAudio come down to buggy ALSA drivers not handling buffer resizing correctly. Adding tsched=0 as a module option "fixes" that by making them not export the buggy interfaces. The result is much the same as playing directly through ALSA. The reason PulseAudio wants to use these interfaces is that it has to make a tradeoff between CPU utilization+battery usage versus low latency. If you use ALSA directly, the first application to open the device controls the size of your buffer. The first client was a music player requesting a large buffer? Then your SIP client will get high-latency audio. PulseAudio tries to fix this by dynamically resizing the buffer. I'm sure there's actual issues with PulseAudio, but somehow most of the problems I see people complain about lie further down the stack. Of course, discussion of pulseaudio is rather off-topic here, it was just one more example of how "just shut down the new thing!" is often easier than diagnosing the actual problem.
anon4 11y ago
The best experience I have with PulseAudio is by layering it on top of JACK.
anonbanker 11y ago
-1 on PulseAudio. I used to be ambivalent on the entire thing until I experienced a proper jack setup (KXStudio). Having a visual interface to plug/sort sound inputs and outputs seems trivial, until you see someone running their skype conversation through FL Studio (in Wine!) to distort their voice using autotune, and then back out to the inputs. Or recording vocals over skype, filter with reverb, and sending them back over skype to the singer. in realtime. this stuff is _trivial_ in KXstudio. Pulseaudio is still struggling with "Front Left", and "Front Right" both playing audio whilst getting in a fistfight with alsa. in 2015. I'm building a (private) linux distribution for my corporations' chromebooks, based on gentoo/calculate KDE. I plan to avoid everything lennart poettering has touched. It'll be simultaneously vindicating and frustrating how my users will be saying "wow. you can do that in linux?" again.

throwaway7767 11y ago

In my experience, most of the problems people have with PulseAudio come down to buggy ALSA drivers not handling buffer resizing correctly. Adding tsched=0 as a module option "fixes" that by making them not export the buggy interfaces. The result is much the same as playing directly through ALSA. The reason PulseAudio wants to use these interfaces is that it has to make a tradeoff between CPU utilization+battery usage versus low latency. If you use ALSA directly, the first application to open the device controls the size of your buffer. The first client was a music player requesting a large buffer? Then your SIP client will get high-latency audio. PulseAudio tries to fix this by dynamically resizing the buffer. I'm sure there's actual issues with PulseAudio, but somehow most of the problems I see people complain about lie further down the stack. Of course, discussion of pulseaudio is rather off-topic here, it was just one more example of how "just shut down the new thing!" is often easier than diagnosing the actual problem.

anon4 11y ago

The best experience I have with PulseAudio is by layering it on top of JACK.

anonbanker 11y ago

-1 on PulseAudio. I used to be ambivalent on the entire thing until I experienced a proper jack setup (KXStudio). Having a visual interface to plug/sort sound inputs and outputs seems trivial, until you see someone running their skype conversation through FL Studio (in Wine!) to distort their voice using autotune, and then back out to the inputs. Or recording vocals over skype, filter with reverb, and sending them back over skype to the singer. in realtime. this stuff is _trivial_ in KXstudio. Pulseaudio is still struggling with "Front Left", and "Front Right" both playing audio whilst getting in a fistfight with alsa. in 2015. I'm building a (private) linux distribution for my corporations' chromebooks, based on gentoo/calculate KDE. I plan to avoid everything lennart poettering has touched. It'll be simultaneously vindicating and frustrating how my users will be saying "wow. you can do that in linux?" again.