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PulseAudio is now required in Firefox Nightly
- therealidiot 10y agoIt sounds as though the code for plain old ALSA is still there though, so if you're building from source you can still enable it ...phew!
- SysArchitect 10y agoHow is sound handled on FreeBSD? Or is FreeBSD going to be required to port and ship PulseAudio?
- Sanddancer 10y agoPulseAudio is cross-platform.. For FreeBSD in general, it uses further development of Open Sound drivers, which have things like in-driver mixing that Linux drivers under Alsa even lack.
- wott 10y ago> things like in-driver mixing that Linux drivers under Alsa even lack. Uh?
- Sanddancer 10y agoFreeBSD's sound drivers include software mixing, so that if there are multiple things that want to use a sound card, they don't block each other. Alsa's sound channels are blocking, which means that only one program at a time can use the sound device, which is what causes the entire tower atop it to form.
- digi_owl 10y agoNope, Alsa has offered dmix for years now.
- the_why_of_y 10y agoWhich is not done in the ALSA driver, but the ALSA user-space library. In contrast to that FreeBSD's OSS drivers do the mixing in kernel-space.
- digi_owl 10y agoBSDs still use OSS, afaik. Linux replaced OSS with Alsa over licensing issues.
- kasabali 10y ago> Linux replaced OSS with Alsa over licensing issues I've only done light reading on the history but I suspect it is more like linux devs used license change of OSSv4 as an excuse to satisfy their NIH syndrome. They could've continued to develop existing OSS codebase as BSD's did but they chose to write ALSA from ground with a totally different design.
- Etheryte 10y agoThe decisions Firefox has made over the last years make less and less sense.
- esaym 10y agoI'm still happy with them as a browser. But not sure now if they force PA on me. I've tired to use/install it (PA) before, but I couldn't stand the PA process hanging around in the background eating 20% of my cpu...especially on laptops.
- Alupis 10y ago> PA process hanging around in the background eating 20% of my cpu Sounds like a misconfiguration if anything. For a typical user - PulseAudio "just works" and there's no more to it than that. It does make large improvements over just plain ALSA, and as far as I know, is included in all the major Linux distros... so many folks use it and never even know nor think about it.
- officialchicken 10y ago> For a typical user - PulseAudio "just works" and there's no more to it than that Nope. Sleep mode, no matter what distro you use, causes issues from 2008 until today [0][1][2]...[n] [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshooting https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Troubleshoot... [1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/762816/ubuntu-16-04-changes-sound-device-after-suspend-how-to-fix http://askubuntu.com/questions/762816/ubuntu-16-04-changes-s... [2] https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=13979 https://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=13979
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoSeems fixed https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93946 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93946
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- namecast 10y agoFor those of you dead set against using PA, you may want to look into this project to emulate PulseAudio support for ALSA: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
- jay-anderson 10y agoNice. I dread having to do any audio configuration on linux. I originally hoped that pulse audio would move linux in the right direction, but in my experience things are as messy as ever with one more ugly wart to worry about. It's made me seriously consider purchasing a mac.
- feld 10y agoAudio works great on FreeBSD
- byuu 10y agoFreeBSD audio has been amazing for as long as I've used it. You can also set these sysctl's: hw.snd.latency_profile=0 hw.snd.latency=3 And then in your OSS code, use this ioctl: int cooked = 0; ioctl(fd, SNDCTL_DSP_COOKEDMODE, &cooked); The result is that I have lower latency with multiple audio streams on FreeBSD than I do on Windows using WASAPI exclusive mode (where your application takes sole control of the sound card.) Pulseaudio on Linux ... doesn't even come close to either in terms of latency. Easily a 60+ ms latency penalty, which is definitely noticeable in video games. And the code to output OSS audio is way simpler and easier than WASAPI, ALSA, and Pulse. Even easier than Pulse's simple API wrapper.
- jay-anderson 10y agoI hadn't even considered any of the BSDs (it's for servers in my mind - a stereotype :) ). I'm definitely going to give it a go. I have a small recording setup in a spare room to play with which is currently running linux.
- tomjakubowski 10y agoI'm not totally sure what Firefox did here, but requiring libpulse isn't the same as requiring PulseAudio. And the comments in that linked issue suggest that this merely introduces a required dependency on libpulse. The standard Chromium package on Arch Linux requires libpulse, but I run it just fine on my laptop with no PulseAudio daemon. It seems like libpulse will fall back to ALSA if the PA daemon isn't running. edit: disclaimer: I know very little about audio on Linux, merely describing my own experience and speculating wildly.
- upofadown 10y agoA quick search revealed no fallback to Alsa built into libpulse. Here is the discussion about Chromium where they are talking about doing their own fallback to Alsa: * https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178101 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178101
- jwildeboer 10y agoIsnt PulseAudio Part of systemd anyway nowadays? SCNR ;-)
- riffic 10y agoI got nothing against this. Desktop Linux needs to grow up.
- digi_owl 10y agoIt had already back in the early 2000s, now is turning senile...
- digi_owl 10y agoIn one word: NUTS.