5 ms·

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

by kfk 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
It's always been a morass of competing, incompatible sound servers and APIs. Coding up anything more trivial than "beep" that works on a wide variety of distributions is painful.
- EdiX 13y ago
  I don't even understand where this myths come from. Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since. Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API. You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?
  - walls 13y ago
    You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.
dscrd 13y ago
It was a problem until Pulseaudio became good -- to my experience, that happened around the 2.0 release. And in a technical sense, it's still a problem, since ALSA contains so much useless complexity now that something like PA finally exists.
rlu 13y ago
I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.
- VLM 13y ago
  What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system. Two separate problems: 1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK. 2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config. For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.
- girvo 13y ago
  Doesn't in Windows, not on every laptop. Dell Studio 15 over here has the same problem on Windows 7. *shrugs, just wanted to add an anecdote.
- parfe 13y ago
  Quickfix: Install pavucontrol. You can control on a per application basis which output to send audio to and move the stream on the fly. It doesn't "Just work" in windows. Windows will set a default and send all audio to that device without any controls for moving audio from one output to another. I have to restart my browser if I want to move from watching netflix on my monitor to my TV.
readme 13y ago
It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't change the volumes of applications individually. You could have used artsd, esd, or something else, but the problem was that there shouldn't be 3 bad solutions to choose from. There should be one good solution. I remember installing redhat 9 and having to configure my sound card driver manually for an old creative soundblaster about 10 years ago. Further, back in those days it was not at all obvious how to get Linux to even play an MP3 (I know, this is an audio encoding and not related to the audio subsystem, but my point is: it was hard. These days you just install a mainstream distro and mp3 codec is there.) Linux has come a tremendous way in the last 10 years. Don't you remember the nightmares? Editing Xorg.conf, and such? But wait, I remember when it was still called XF86Config. /me shudders Today anyone can pop in an ubuntu dvd and be rolling in seconds with all hardware working (for a lot of systems*). Not long ago we had to research our hardware and hunt down solutions just to get a working machine.
- teeja 13y ago
  Really. I just installed LM LXDE 11 on an ancient PC the other day that had a Soundblaster card covered in dust. Started up an MP3 and started plugging a 1/8" plug into holes on the back. When I got to the SB card, bingo. No install, no prefs ... just worked.
greyfade 13y ago
For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound servers that tried to alleviate the problem, but they all used incompatible APIs and couldn't be used in parallel. It was, and is, awful. It's only very, very recently that PulseAudio has gotten to the point where it works most of the time, and it still has major unresolved problems. And there are still programs that use the OSS and ALSA APIs directly. While it does work fairly well, there are still incompatibility issues with programs that use Pulse. It's ludicrous to suggest that there are no problems.

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

by kfk 13y ago

No, sound is not a problem on Linux. I wonder if it ever was actually.

It's always been a morass of competing, incompatible sound servers and APIs. Coding up anything more trivial than "beep" that works on a wide variety of distributions is painful.

EdiX 13y ago
I don't even understand where this myths come from. Linux "the kernel" switched 15 years ago from OSS to ALSA for drivers, ALSA has been backwards compatible with OSS since. Gnome and KDE used to have their own user space sound servers (called EsounD and aRts) mostly to impement software mixing. They were completely replaced over 5 years ago by PulseAudio which is backwards compatible with both as well as applications using ALSA or OSS API. You could code an application using OSS API and be compatible with the first release of linux that had sound. What problems do you have exactly with your beeps?
- walls 13y ago
  You got lucky with your hardware; nothing more. Sound in Linux has been a living nightmare.

dscrd 13y ago

It was a problem until Pulseaudio became good -- to my experience, that happened around the 2.0 release. And in a technical sense, it's still a problem, since ALSA contains so much useless complexity now that something like PA finally exists.

rlu 13y ago

I have a netbook running xubuntu and when I connect it to a TV via HDMI, the sound continues to come from the netbook rather than from the TV. I googled for some fixes and couldn't find any quick fix that worked. This should "just work" in my opinion. It does in Windows and I'm sure OSX makes it just as painless.

VLM 13y ago
What does "just work" mean? I have a mythtv frontend that squirts its video out a HDMI and audio out of a optical fiber to the surround sound system. It would drive me crazy if sound came out of the horrible TV speakers instead of the surround sound system. Two separate problems: 1) Default behavior where no change is the least surprising so at least that is OK. 2) Modify config where its obviously a fail if you can't figure out how to change the config. For whatever its worth, if you use ALSA, mythtv is ALSA compatible, so I merely go into "config" "audio" and mess around with audio options to my hearts content.
girvo 13y ago
Doesn't in Windows, not on every laptop. Dell Studio 15 over here has the same problem on Windows 7. *shrugs, just wanted to add an anecdote.
parfe 13y ago
Quickfix: Install pavucontrol. You can control on a per application basis which output to send audio to and move the stream on the fly. It doesn't "Just work" in windows. Windows will set a default and send all audio to that device without any controls for moving audio from one output to another. I have to restart my browser if I want to move from watching netflix on my monitor to my TV.

readme 13y ago

It was. Before pulseaudio became the de-facto standard lots of people wouldn't even install an additional layer and use plain old alsa. Which meant you couldn't change the volumes of applications individually. You could have used artsd, esd, or something else, but the problem was that there shouldn't be 3 bad solutions to choose from. There should be one good solution. I remember installing redhat 9 and having to configure my sound card driver manually for an old creative soundblaster about 10 years ago. Further, back in those days it was not at all obvious how to get Linux to even play an MP3 (I know, this is an audio encoding and not related to the audio subsystem, but my point is: it was hard. These days you just install a mainstream distro and mp3 codec is there.) Linux has come a tremendous way in the last 10 years. Don't you remember the nightmares? Editing Xorg.conf, and such? But wait, I remember when it was still called XF86Config. /me shudders Today anyone can pop in an ubuntu dvd and be rolling in seconds with all hardware working (for a lot of systems*). Not long ago we had to research our hardware and hunt down solutions just to get a working machine.

teeja 13y ago
Really. I just installed LM LXDE 11 on an ancient PC the other day that had a Soundblaster card covered in dust. Started up an MP3 and started plugging a 1/8" plug into holes on the back. When I got to the SB card, bingo. No install, no prefs ... just worked.

greyfade 13y ago

For many years, the API incompatibility between OSS and ALSA made getting sound working at all was often a nightmarish task. There were a number of sound servers that tried to alleviate the problem, but they all used incompatible APIs and couldn't be used in parallel. It was, and is, awful. It's only very, very recently that PulseAudio has gotten to the point where it works most of the time, and it still has major unresolved problems. And there are still programs that use the OSS and ALSA APIs directly. While it does work fairly well, there are still incompatibility issues with programs that use Pulse. It's ludicrous to suggest that there are no problems.