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> In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly). screams in terror The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much fin

by ilyt 4y ago

> In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly). screams in terror The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether your sound output is special enough to work well with it. And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is another nightmare. Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects". Jack at least gets that part right Trying to get some audio interface to be connected properly was... an experience, it just showed in system as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly > Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained. I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with pipewire would've been enough...

dijit 4y ago
Pulseaudio is so extremely over complicated that it took years of distro maintainers trying to wrangle it into a working default configuration for many people, and it was adopted because ALSA didn’t (but was going to) support multiple inputs to a single output. It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd). Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut. It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.
- ilyt 4y ago
  It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio" was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time they needed to run some voice chat app... ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.
  - dijit 4y ago
    > ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default It was being developed. People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job. Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA. The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
      - 0x457 4y ago
        Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all. Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
  - 72deluxe 4y ago
    I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything. It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.
nobleach 4y ago
I thought to myself, I think I'll stream some Codewars challenges on Twitch. I have a Shure mic, a Sony ZV-E10, and some speakers for listening to music. Surely Linux can handle all this and pipe the audio into OBS... Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.
prmoustache 4y ago
I don't understand why you bring pulsaudio to the table when answering about JACK. This is unrelated.

by ilyt 4y ago

dijit 4y ago

Pulseaudio is so extremely over complicated that it took years of distro maintainers trying to wrangle it into a working default configuration for many people, and it was adopted because ALSA didn’t (but was going to) support multiple inputs to a single output. It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd). Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut. It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.

ilyt 4y ago
It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio" was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time they needed to run some voice chat app... ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.
- dijit 4y ago
  > ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default It was being developed. People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job. Which, happens unfortunately frequently.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA. The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).
    - 0x457 4y ago
      Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all. Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.
- 72deluxe 4y ago
  I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything. It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.

nobleach 4y ago

I thought to myself, I think I'll stream some Codewars challenges on Twitch. I have a Shure mic, a Sony ZV-E10, and some speakers for listening to music. Surely Linux can handle all this and pipe the audio into OBS... Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.

prmoustache 4y ago

I don't understand why you bring pulsaudio to the table when answering about JACK. This is unrelated.