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Raw ALSA can only have one program playing sound unless your hardware has support for hardware mixing (this would generally mean it's very old and also very exp
by amaranth 4y ago
Raw ALSA can only have one program playing sound unless your hardware has support for hardware mixing (this would generally mean it's very old and also very expensive). More likely you are/were using ALSA's dmix plugin which is a small barebones version of the core functionality of pulseaudio or pipewire. They replace dmix but also give you things like per-program volume control, better latency, better power usage, better mixing, bluetooth support, the ability to do fancy things with audio routing without restarting every program playing audio, etc.
- codedokode 4y agoI am not sure about "better latency". The latency with Pulseaudio cannot be controlled via GUI and is often quite large (on order of hundred ms or more). In my opinion, to get minimum latency one needs to access audio card directly, without intermediate daemons.
- seba_dos1 4y agoPA isn't great when it comes to latency, but JACK and PW are.
- amaranth 4y agoPulseAudio optimizes for power consumption but tries to be adaptive to handle lower latency as well. PipeWire seems to optimize for latency but try to be adaptive to reduce power consumption as well. These are conflicting desires, lower latency requires higher power usage because you have to use shorter buffers instead of just giving the sound card a big chunk of audio to work through and putting the CPU to sleep. JACK could potentially still do better and ALSA could potentially still do better than even that but PipeWire's goal is to be close enough or even match JACK while still having all the other features people use PulseAudio for.
- traverseda 4y agoI'm not really sure what the difference between "ALSA just works" and "ALSA as configured by my distribution and including the DMIX plugin just works" is. Like at the end of the day option 2 is still "ALSA just works".