4 ms·

Better release notes: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/5.0/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/5.... Personally

by dfc 13y ago

Better release notes: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/5.0/ http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Notes/5.... Personally Pulseaudio has always been "that thing that fixes all those problems I never had with ALSA." I realize there is more to it than that but I have never really understood what pulseaudio does for me a casual sound user? Sound on my computer is exclusively produced by mpd, vlc and flashplugin-nonfree and I do not remember the last time I used a microphone on a linux machine.[1] I have browsed through the docs a couple of times but I have never figured out why, let alone how, I would want to change anything. The only thing about Pulseaudio that I am confident of is that it is less overkill than jackd for my use cases. What am I missing? [1]: I guess I have used the microphone a couple of times but it was always because I thought I would try Skype again. But this always resulted in a ton of wasted time with 32bit libraries and an avalanche of qt dependencies. I would get skype to work but I used it so rarely that by the time I needed it again I had to go through all the nonsense all over again.

codyps 13y ago
The only thing I've used it for is switching between HDMI-SPDIF and analog speaker/headphone outputs without needing to restart programs.
th0ma5 13y ago
I think some of the virtualization of devices and device sharing works a little better with Pulse. I think the UI is little slicker for some of this. I still use ALSA for post-processing on my media center, and I have used Jack for music applications. In general Linux audio is a clusterfuck, but once you dig through it all it is hard to criticize without advocating making an even bigger mess.
- pja 13y ago
  Yeah, it's a bit like printing: It seems like it ought to be straightforward but it turns out that reality disagrees rather vehemently.
  - dfc 13y ago
    Printing? If you think CUPS is bad I take it you never had to get lpd and some crappy HP inkjet to work. What does CUPS not do for you? Last time I looked it even does avahi by default. Sure having a million foomatic filters installed is a waste of space but I have never come across a printer that was not covered by the base set of filters.
    - pja 13y ago
      I don't think CUPS is bad at all: Printing is such a craptacular nightmare that CUPS is one of the least worst solutions around. It speaks volumes that Apple chucked their extant printing code in the bin and switched to CUPS as their printing backend, because CUPS was better than any of the alternatives available to them.
      - dfc 13y ago
        What is craptacular about printing?
darklajid 13y ago
You're missing hardware - and use cases. I tend to like headphones that are connected via USB. Those are 'soundcards' and switching sound between those wasn't really possible without PA. I often like to look at the output sources and mute (or reduce in volume) some sources, leaving the rest intact. My use cases really just revolve around those. Works fine for me. flashplugin-nonfree is a nice example for something to mute, btw..
- dfc 13y ago
  What headphones do you use? I think a lot of this is just a difference in workflow. I don't think I have ever intentionally had two programs playing sound at the same time. NoScript/RequestPolicy/Adblock essentially mute flashplugin-nonfree for me. The only places flash runs are places where I want the sound.
  - darklajid 13y ago
    The headphones do not matter, USB headphones were picked as examples because they're 'sound cards' usually. You could substitute 'moving from HDMI output to your speakers' or something. It's just about the ability of migrating running audio between devices, something I'm regularly doing. Sound at the same time: Happens regularly for me. I'm listening to music and some IM client runs. I could mute that client (in the client itself) or .. reduce the volume of that one application (in PA). NoScript and RequestPolicy were too much of a hassle to me in the past tbh. I regularly end up with a braindead/moronic website playing some random video. Muting flash while I look for the offending tab makes me a much saner person.
    - dfc 13y ago
      Were the headphones a contrived example? I was just curious about the headphones and how they performed. Most of the usb headphones I have seen sounded like garbage. I really think a lot of it is workflow. When I thought about that AOL new IM noise I cringed. I like my bells to be visual.
  - roberto 13y ago
zanny 13y ago
If you've used ALSA and Pulse for an extended time (assuming you used dmix), and you never found anything wrong with ALSA that you needed Pulse for, then you really aren't missing anything. The pros of pulse are that it intercepts audio outputs from programs including legacy ones looking for OSS, it can work over a network (so you can have audio streams from one machine output on another) and nothing can ever grab the audio sink from pulse assuming you use the pulseaudio-alsa shim wrapper. I find this very useful, because it means the worst thing a misbehaving program can do is make some awful sounding trash underrun PCM nonsense come out of my speakers, but it can't seize my sound card. Other advantages are that most GUI programs (Veromix is amazing) target pulse, but in practice you can use ladspa / lv2 plugins with alsa, you can use per-channel volume control and multiple outputs via dmix, and alsamixer is really intuitive even if it is ncurses based compared to pavucontrol. From a developers perspective, having used alsa, pulse, ports, etc - I'd never touch any of that nonsense (again, at least, and if I don't have to). Depending on the applciation I'm either using gstreamer if I'm Linux native or SDL / QtMultimedia if I'm cross platform. But you get a lot of very peculiar sound mixing features from using alsa / pulse apis directly (pulse especially, you can do all kinds of nonsense to your streams) that might bind you to them over more abstract APIs.
- vidoc 13y ago
  Networking with pulseaudio is a pretty useful feature indeed. I've unfortunately never managed to make it work correctly with flash vids (e.g: youtube). Any success story would be greatly appreciated!
  - dfc 13y ago
    https://askubuntu.com/questions/122148/flash-in-browsers-does-not-play-sound-accurately-using-pulse-network-audio https://askubuntu.com/questions/122148/flash-in-browsers-doe...
  - Spittie 13y ago
    This is an awesome setup: http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulseaudio.html http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulsea...
e12e 13y ago
Oh, so bluetooth audio is broken now, if you want input as well (apparently not just for pulsaudio). That's great, I was just about getting ready to experiment with a2dp and friends :-(

by dfc 13y ago

codyps 13y ago

The only thing I've used it for is switching between HDMI-SPDIF and analog speaker/headphone outputs without needing to restart programs.

th0ma5 13y ago

I think some of the virtualization of devices and device sharing works a little better with Pulse. I think the UI is little slicker for some of this. I still use ALSA for post-processing on my media center, and I have used Jack for music applications. In general Linux audio is a clusterfuck, but once you dig through it all it is hard to criticize without advocating making an even bigger mess.

pja 13y ago
Yeah, it's a bit like printing: It seems like it ought to be straightforward but it turns out that reality disagrees rather vehemently.
- dfc 13y ago
  Printing? If you think CUPS is bad I take it you never had to get lpd and some crappy HP inkjet to work. What does CUPS not do for you? Last time I looked it even does avahi by default. Sure having a million foomatic filters installed is a waste of space but I have never come across a printer that was not covered by the base set of filters.
  - pja 13y ago
    I don't think CUPS is bad at all: Printing is such a craptacular nightmare that CUPS is one of the least worst solutions around. It speaks volumes that Apple chucked their extant printing code in the bin and switched to CUPS as their printing backend, because CUPS was better than any of the alternatives available to them.
    - dfc 13y ago
      What is craptacular about printing?

darklajid 13y ago

You're missing hardware - and use cases. I tend to like headphones that are connected via USB. Those are 'soundcards' and switching sound between those wasn't really possible without PA. I often like to look at the output sources and mute (or reduce in volume) some sources, leaving the rest intact. My use cases really just revolve around those. Works fine for me. flashplugin-nonfree is a nice example for something to mute, btw..

dfc 13y ago
What headphones do you use? I think a lot of this is just a difference in workflow. I don't think I have ever intentionally had two programs playing sound at the same time. NoScript/RequestPolicy/Adblock essentially mute flashplugin-nonfree for me. The only places flash runs are places where I want the sound.
- darklajid 13y ago
  The headphones do not matter, USB headphones were picked as examples because they're 'sound cards' usually. You could substitute 'moving from HDMI output to your speakers' or something. It's just about the ability of migrating running audio between devices, something I'm regularly doing. Sound at the same time: Happens regularly for me. I'm listening to music and some IM client runs. I could mute that client (in the client itself) or .. reduce the volume of that one application (in PA). NoScript and RequestPolicy were too much of a hassle to me in the past tbh. I regularly end up with a braindead/moronic website playing some random video. Muting flash while I look for the offending tab makes me a much saner person.
  - dfc 13y ago
    Were the headphones a contrived example? I was just curious about the headphones and how they performed. Most of the usb headphones I have seen sounded like garbage. I really think a lot of it is workflow. When I thought about that AOL new IM noise I cringed. I like my bells to be visual.
- roberto 13y ago

zanny 13y ago

If you've used ALSA and Pulse for an extended time (assuming you used dmix), and you never found anything wrong with ALSA that you needed Pulse for, then you really aren't missing anything. The pros of pulse are that it intercepts audio outputs from programs including legacy ones looking for OSS, it can work over a network (so you can have audio streams from one machine output on another) and nothing can ever grab the audio sink from pulse assuming you use the pulseaudio-alsa shim wrapper. I find this very useful, because it means the worst thing a misbehaving program can do is make some awful sounding trash underrun PCM nonsense come out of my speakers, but it can't seize my sound card. Other advantages are that most GUI programs (Veromix is amazing) target pulse, but in practice you can use ladspa / lv2 plugins with alsa, you can use per-channel volume control and multiple outputs via dmix, and alsamixer is really intuitive even if it is ncurses based compared to pavucontrol. From a developers perspective, having used alsa, pulse, ports, etc - I'd never touch any of that nonsense (again, at least, and if I don't have to). Depending on the applciation I'm either using gstreamer if I'm Linux native or SDL / QtMultimedia if I'm cross platform. But you get a lot of very peculiar sound mixing features from using alsa / pulse apis directly (pulse especially, you can do all kinds of nonsense to your streams) that might bind you to them over more abstract APIs.

vidoc 13y ago
Networking with pulseaudio is a pretty useful feature indeed. I've unfortunately never managed to make it work correctly with flash vids (e.g: youtube). Any success story would be greatly appreciated!
- dfc 13y ago
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/122148/flash-in-browsers-does-not-play-sound-accurately-using-pulse-network-audio https://askubuntu.com/questions/122148/flash-in-browsers-doe...
- Spittie 13y ago
  This is an awesome setup: http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulseaudio.html http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulsea...

e12e 13y ago

Oh, so bluetooth audio is broken now, if you want input as well (apparently not just for pulsaudio). That's great, I was just about getting ready to experiment with a2dp and friends :-(