4 ms·

> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing break

> If you have sufficiently boring PC hardware and sufficiently boring use cases, the audio will just kind of work anyway, without PulseAudio. Introducing breakage, complexity and general fragility to the common case, which was previously working fine, will obviously make a whole lot of people upset.

esarbe 4y ago
Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.
- robonerd 4y ago
  I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
    Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
    - JetSpiegel 4y ago
      That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
      - robonerd 4y ago
    - robonerd 4y ago
      "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        >do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit Are you sure you're responding to the correct post? I didn't say anything remotely like this. I asked if you would report the bug or try to do a little debugging, like spending a few minutes up to an hour. You don't have to learn any ropes, the internals should be very familiar to anyone who knows C and has some knowledge of audio. If this is important to your job, the company should be willing to let you do this on paid time. This stuff is open source, you either have a support vendor you pay to fix these bugs, or your company assigns developers to fix them yourself. There is no other way it happens. It's not a waste of time if you actually fix the bug. And just to stress this, there is no other way the bugs get fixed. This is it. This is the whole thing. Some person somewhere does actually need to drop everything and go and start spending time fixing the bugs. No, it doesn't have to be for weeks. If you think a thousand bugs is a lot, well, yeah, it is. That's why you need to go take some initiative to give some information, to make your bug known and make it possible for anyone else to help. Otherwise, it blends in with all the other low-information bugs and it falls back on you to go fix it yourself. A bug report that just says "it doesn't work" with no additional information is not actionable, you need to provide more than that for anyone to be able to help you. If you become hostile after being asked to spend a few minutes reporting bugs, then it is definitely going to be impossible for anyone to help you.
  - esarbe 4y ago
    > only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't. Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive. > I never experienced any trouble with audio I refer to stuff alsa drivers reporting wrong values[0] or cards being locked to a specific rate [1] Before pulseaudio only one application could access the sound card. And alsa-mixer was broken half of the time. The list of defects goes on and on. Configuration relied on different settings of also that needed to be tuned for each driver separately. Getting sound to work on Linux was not a fun place to be.[2] Pulseaudio exposed all these problems using a unified interface and forced "us" to fix these bugs. [0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/410887 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/410887 [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/1034325263.474.37.camel@diesel/T/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/1034325263.474.37.camel@diesel/T... [2] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/configuring-linux-sound-services-with-alsa/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/configuring-linux-sound...
    - robonerd 4y ago
      > Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive. It's simple: Don't tell other people what they did or didn't experience. If you don't understand that, then you aren't worth talking to.
    - welterde 4y ago
      > Before pulseaudio only one application could access the sound card. That's only true if the sound card has no hardware mixing support (or very limited number of streams, where it would suddenly break after a certain number of applications) _and_ the alsa setup didn't include dmix (software mixing). Not sure what problems you had with alsamixer, for me it always worked (but maybe I never tried anything sufficiently fancy for it to break). But I am with the previous poster on this. I have had way more problems with pulseaudio than without. Also it's not only alsa drivers that can be at fault here, but pulseaudio also consults other hardware databases which alsa does not use, which can contain mistakes that can make pulseaudio unusable (had that issue not even a month ago with an external usb sound card).
vetinari 4y ago
Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine. I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in drop outs. PA couldn't fix the hardware, but could resample everything to 48 kHz on CPU, and with that there was no playback problem. So yes, it exposed problems, and it forced to fix them. We are all better off today for that.
- TylerE 4y ago
  By far the best sound experience I've ever had on *nix was FreeBSD's fork of OSS. Dead simple API.. the /dev/dsp device had software multiplexing so multiple apps was no problem.
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    Alsa has it via dmix although not as the defaut. Probably because Lennaert.
klodolph 4y ago
What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate? One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.
- robonerd 4y ago
  Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    Interesting. I'd still rather have that problem than the massive, massive problems I tend to have without PulseAudio. Only one app can make sound at a time, can't adjust volume at all, that sort of thing.
Crysstalis 4y ago
Computer users are continually upset about a lot of things. That's just the way it is. If you work in the industry then that should make you happy, it means you will always be employed.

esarbe 4y ago

Linux audio was never working fine. It was a mess of broken drivers and incompatible implementations. I cannot fathom how people are able to repress the memory of how bad Linux audio was before pulseaudio.

robonerd 4y ago
I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?
  - JetSpiegel 4y ago
    That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.
    - robonerd 4y ago
  - robonerd 4y ago
    "Why didn't you just become a pulseaudio dev if you hate pulseaudio so much" Get fucking real, I have better things to do with my life than waste time ingratiating myself with the likes of pusleaudio devs. "Audio stopped working" describes hundreds if not thousands of pulseaudio bugs, do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit? Get real.
    - Crysstalis 4y ago
      >do you really expect frustrated end users to drop everything else going on in their life and spend weeks learning the ropes of this shit Are you sure you're responding to the correct post? I didn't say anything remotely like this. I asked if you would report the bug or try to do a little debugging, like spending a few minutes up to an hour. You don't have to learn any ropes, the internals should be very familiar to anyone who knows C and has some knowledge of audio. If this is important to your job, the company should be willing to let you do this on paid time. This stuff is open source, you either have a support vendor you pay to fix these bugs, or your company assigns developers to fix them yourself. There is no other way it happens. It's not a waste of time if you actually fix the bug. And just to stress this, there is no other way the bugs get fixed. This is it. This is the whole thing. Some person somewhere does actually need to drop everything and go and start spending time fixing the bugs. No, it doesn't have to be for weeks. If you think a thousand bugs is a lot, well, yeah, it is. That's why you need to go take some initiative to give some information, to make your bug known and make it possible for anyone else to help. Otherwise, it blends in with all the other low-information bugs and it falls back on you to go fix it yourself. A bug report that just says "it doesn't work" with no additional information is not actionable, you need to provide more than that for anyone to be able to help you. If you become hostile after being asked to spend a few minutes reporting bugs, then it is definitely going to be impossible for anyone to help you.
- esarbe 4y ago
  > only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't. Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive. > I never experienced any trouble with audio I refer to stuff alsa drivers reporting wrong values[0] or cards being locked to a specific rate [1] Before pulseaudio only one application could access the sound card. And alsa-mixer was broken half of the time. The list of defects goes on and on. Configuration relied on different settings of also that needed to be tuned for each driver separately. Getting sound to work on Linux was not a fun place to be.[2] Pulseaudio exposed all these problems using a unified interface and forced "us" to fix these bugs. [0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/410887 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/410887 [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/1034325263.474.37.camel@diesel/T/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/1034325263.474.37.camel@diesel/T... [2] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/configuring-linux-sound-services-with-alsa/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/configuring-linux-sound...
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > Oh dear.. I'm not going to comment on that. I don't think it's productive. It's simple: Don't tell other people what they did or didn't experience. If you don't understand that, then you aren't worth talking to.
  - welterde 4y ago
    > Before pulseaudio only one application could access the sound card. That's only true if the sound card has no hardware mixing support (or very limited number of streams, where it would suddenly break after a certain number of applications) _and_ the alsa setup didn't include dmix (software mixing). Not sure what problems you had with alsamixer, for me it always worked (but maybe I never tried anything sufficiently fancy for it to break). But I am with the previous poster on this. I have had way more problems with pulseaudio than without. Also it's not only alsa drivers that can be at fault here, but pulseaudio also consults other hardware databases which alsa does not use, which can contain mistakes that can make pulseaudio unusable (had that issue not even a month ago with an external usb sound card).

vetinari 4y ago

Audio in Linux before PA certainly wasn't working fine. Turning off your mp3 player and restarting your browser, because you want to play youtube via flash plugin? Sorry, but that's not fine. I had my share of hardware, and PA had problem with only one piece (a nettop with Nvidia Ion2, audio via hdmi). It turned out that the hardware couldn't really play 44,1 kHz audio, it's clock was too unreliable and resulted in drop outs. PA couldn't fix the hardware, but could resample everything to 48 kHz on CPU, and with that there was no playback problem. So yes, it exposed problems, and it forced to fix them. We are all better off today for that.

TylerE 4y ago
By far the best sound experience I've ever had on *nix was FreeBSD's fork of OSS. Dead simple API.. the /dev/dsp device had software multiplexing so multiple apps was no problem.
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago
  Alsa has it via dmix although not as the defaut. Probably because Lennaert.

klodolph 4y ago

What kind of breakage, complexity, and general fragility are you seeing with PulseAudio? Can you elaborate? One big problem here is that the "good path" for audio without PulseAudio applies to a shrinking segment of Linux user base.

robonerd 4y ago
Sound stops and doesn't work until I restart pulseaudio. You know, the usual. I think some people restart their whole computer and blame their drivers, but restarting pulseaudio alone is what fixes it nine times out of ten.
- klodolph 4y ago
  Interesting. I'd still rather have that problem than the massive, massive problems I tend to have without PulseAudio. Only one app can make sound at a time, can't adjust volume at all, that sort of thing.

Crysstalis 4y ago

Computer users are continually upset about a lot of things. That's just the way it is. If you work in the industry then that should make you happy, it means you will always be employed.