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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 re
by 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 agoNetworking 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 agohttps://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 agoThis is an awesome setup: http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulseaudio.html http://www.hackerposse.com/~rozzin/journal/whole-home-pulsea...
- dfc 13y ago> legacy OSS Are there actually programs that still use OSS? When I see OSS I think redhat rembrandt or picasso and kernel 1.2.12. I thought OSS was killed off in 2.2.x or 2.4? > alsamixer is really intuitive even if it is ncurses based compared to pavucontrol. I don't mind ncurses; to be honest I have never really complained about an ncurses interface compared to the gtk equivalent. It is funny that you mention QT, I will put up with pulseaudio even though I do not think I need it installed. QT/KDE is another story. I would like to use rkward but every time I type `apt-get --no-install-recommends install rkward` I take one look at the list of dependencies and say forget it. I think its nuts that a stats program depends on kde-runtime. If rkward just needed some extra qt libs (similar to gnumeric grabbing some gtk libs but not gnome-core) I would probably bite the bullet and install it. I hope my reply did not sound bitchy, I appreciate you taking the time to explain the sound madness to me. Do you do professional audio work?
- wtallis 13y agoALSA didn't get accepted into the kernel until the 2.5 series, so OSS was the default for all the Red Hat Linux releases and even the first Fedora Core release.
- dfc 13y agoWow. It seemed like it was longer than ten years ago.
- Sanddancer 13y agoThere are quite a few operating systems that didn't get dragged into the ALSA mess, like the BSDs. OSS versions of late have managed to solve the complaints people had which led to alsa, plus added things like virtual audio channels, so that apps think they're getting the full audio device. OSS support is more than a bit useful because everyone uses it.
- dfc 13y agoCan you think of any apps that need OSS? That is not snark, I am genuinely curious what applications require OSS.