3 ms·

> but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history Believe me, they are not. They might be history for you, but not for everyone. Many no

by jbk 15y ago

> but now, a few years on I can honestly say those problems are history Believe me, they are not. They might be history for you, but not for everyone. Many non-standard setups (using Jack, using pass-through, using bluetooth headsets) are still broken. Applications using Phonon have very different behaviors with or without PA. KMix and pavucontrol still behave very differently from each other...

pyre 15y ago
It seems like most of your complaints have to do with KDE.
- jbk 15y ago
  That is because I am using it those days, nothing more... Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  Gnome user here. PulseAudio is always screwing up the settings on/misbehaving with my SB Live 5.1, and there's no way to assign the rear or center/lfe outputs as headphone outputs instead, which is a piece of cake with plain ALSA (just use alsamixer to set the Wave Surround mixer to ~-16dB). Oh yeah, PulseAudio also ignores the decibel hints given by ALSA, and frequently sets the output gain to +12dB on some integrated sound cards, causing terrible distortion. Applications trying to work around the PulseAudio situation (Skype, Flash) by preventing me from selecting my hardware-mixed ALSA output have their own problems. I have many other complaints, but it's far easier to just uninstall PA and have a nice, clean audio system.
  - andor 15y ago
    If you find a bug in actively maintained software like PulseAudio, please report it. The best thing to do here is not to work around a bug, but to participate in the community and help to improve the software.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations. There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.

by jbk 15y ago

pyre 15y ago

It seems like most of your complaints have to do with KDE.

jbk 15y ago
That is because I am using it those days, nothing more... Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.
nitrogen 15y ago
Gnome user here. PulseAudio is always screwing up the settings on/misbehaving with my SB Live 5.1, and there's no way to assign the rear or center/lfe outputs as headphone outputs instead, which is a piece of cake with plain ALSA (just use alsamixer to set the Wave Surround mixer to ~-16dB). Oh yeah, PulseAudio also ignores the decibel hints given by ALSA, and frequently sets the output gain to +12dB on some integrated sound cards, causing terrible distortion. Applications trying to work around the PulseAudio situation (Skype, Flash) by preventing me from selecting my hardware-mixed ALSA output have their own problems. I have many other complaints, but it's far easier to just uninstall PA and have a nice, clean audio system.
- andor 15y ago
  If you find a bug in actively maintained software like PulseAudio, please report it. The best thing to do here is not to work around a bug, but to participate in the community and help to improve the software.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    That's the ideal situation, of course, but I disagree with the entire premise of PulseAudio. It has some interesting features (per-application volume, network audio, synchronization between sound cards at slightly different sample rates), but those should have been implemented as additions to ALSA and/or one of the jackd implementations. There are also the hurdles to jump through of signing up for a bug tracker account, searching for existing similar bugs, watching my report get ignored because it's not an "average user" use case, etc. For someone like me who's experienced with ALSA, written a sound card driver, and had things "just work" for a very long time, there's greater incentive for me to just rip out PulseAudio and get back to work.