4 ms·

I've had the same issue and finally bit the bullet and installed pulseaudio. I was semi-pleasantly surprised: it actually works most of the time on my computer

by simias 5y ago

I've had the same issue and finally bit the bullet and installed pulseaudio. I was semi-pleasantly surprised: it actually works most of the time on my computer these days. I still have to mess with a billion things when I want to do anything more complicated than basic music playback, but for that it sorta works which is already pretty great by Linux audio standards.

mousepilot 5y ago
I'm really into music as a hobby and I don't want to mess up one of my few working computers. I do admit to using a youtube downloader some when I want to view a video.
- simias 5y ago
  Yeah I definitely see where you're coming from, unfortunately I just cowardly reboot on my Windows partition when I want to do "serious" audio work because Linux is just an exercise in frustration in my experience.
kaba0 5y ago
I mean, the days are long gone when pulseaudio was buggy as hell. It is quite stable for years now, so much that now there is another unifying audio stack: pipewire. It will still require pulseaudio for most software (it provides a stub for it), and it is very early release but I’ve been using it with only occasional bugs.
- simias 5y ago
  I've had pretty terrible experiences with pulseaudio only a few years ago. As often on Linux I was probably unlucky with hardware support. More generally I've always been frustrated with Linux audio because in my experience for basic audio playback OSS mostly Just Worked and every single API that came after it was buggier and harder to configure for the simple cases while still usually not good enough for professional use. One exception was Jack which I like quite a lot, unfortunately it's also not natively supported by a lot of software, and that adds a lot of complications in my experience. But again, I've been running pulse for about six months now and I haven't had any major issues, so credit where it's due.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    The great thing about pipewire is that it provides a jack stub as well — you can use both pulseaudio and jack software side by side, and even pipe them to each other. I truly believe that once it stabilizes, linux will potentially be the best platform for audio production.
    - simias 5y ago
      I must admit that I'm skeptical of yet another Linux sound API but I really hope that you're right, I'd really like to be able to use Linux for serious sound stuff and finally ditch Windows for that too. I would even be willing to finally learn how to use Ardour correctly!
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      I'm developing a DAW, https://ossia.io https://ossia.io and was recently very impressed by Pipewire : it's able to sustain 32 samples of latency on my hardware (multiface 2) while still working with Firefox, etc.
globular-toast 5y ago
I run a minimal Gentoo system and it includes pulseaudio. It just works. No problems with it whatsoever. But on Ubuntu work machine it can be a pain. I don't know why this is.

by simias 5y ago

mousepilot 5y ago

I'm really into music as a hobby and I don't want to mess up one of my few working computers. I do admit to using a youtube downloader some when I want to view a video.

simias 5y ago
Yeah I definitely see where you're coming from, unfortunately I just cowardly reboot on my Windows partition when I want to do "serious" audio work because Linux is just an exercise in frustration in my experience.

kaba0 5y ago

I mean, the days are long gone when pulseaudio was buggy as hell. It is quite stable for years now, so much that now there is another unifying audio stack: pipewire. It will still require pulseaudio for most software (it provides a stub for it), and it is very early release but I’ve been using it with only occasional bugs.

simias 5y ago
I've had pretty terrible experiences with pulseaudio only a few years ago. As often on Linux I was probably unlucky with hardware support. More generally I've always been frustrated with Linux audio because in my experience for basic audio playback OSS mostly Just Worked and every single API that came after it was buggier and harder to configure for the simple cases while still usually not good enough for professional use. One exception was Jack which I like quite a lot, unfortunately it's also not natively supported by a lot of software, and that adds a lot of complications in my experience. But again, I've been running pulse for about six months now and I haven't had any major issues, so credit where it's due.
- kaba0 5y ago
  The great thing about pipewire is that it provides a jack stub as well — you can use both pulseaudio and jack software side by side, and even pipe them to each other. I truly believe that once it stabilizes, linux will potentially be the best platform for audio production.
  - simias 5y ago
    I must admit that I'm skeptical of yet another Linux sound API but I really hope that you're right, I'd really like to be able to use Linux for serious sound stuff and finally ditch Windows for that too. I would even be willing to finally learn how to use Ardour correctly!
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    I'm developing a DAW, https://ossia.io https://ossia.io and was recently very impressed by Pipewire : it's able to sustain 32 samples of latency on my hardware (multiface 2) while still working with Firefox, etc.

globular-toast 5y ago

I run a minimal Gentoo system and it includes pulseaudio. It just works. No problems with it whatsoever. But on Ubuntu work machine it can be a pain. I don't know why this is.