3 ms·

What is your experience with Pulse Audio? I don't know much about Linux audio but my understanding is that various transitions between technologies were a sourc

by j_s 13y ago

What is your experience with Pulse Audio? I don't know much about Linux audio but my understanding is that various transitions between technologies were a source of many frustrations. What is running under Jack on your system?

Morgawr 13y ago
Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried (Arch, Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu). When I was running Debian (this was 2 years ago, by the way) I used to need to kill Pulseaudio before launching Jack because the two systems used to conflict and when Jack was running a lot of Pulseaudio applications wouldn't work (so, for example, if you had Jack running you couldn't watch a movie with audio through pulse). Nowadays I use Manjaro as desktop distro and I can just launch qjackctl (or resume a ladish session) without needing to manually stop pulse myself, it's all done automatically and it's really seamless. I use jack only when I'm doing sound production/recording, for everything else Pulseaudio is great.
boyaka 13y ago
All I know is that coming from the Windows world with Stereo Mix and the configurability/stability of recording/playback devices, I have been constantly frustrated with my experience in Ubuntu. There have been a few moments of surprisingly pleasant features, but most of it has been frustrations such as: - Low volume levels, and all the means I have tried to amplify cause quality degradation - Random devices showing up on streaming sites depending on what version of flash I'm running - Complete inability to access certain devices, non-functionality of "monitors" or just confusion about how the hell they work Back during the times I was trying to deal with this I had attempted to switch over to ALSA/OSS or whatever and it was not a pleasant experience. I recall not even being able to get back to the functionality I had with pulseaudio before, and found no improvement on the low volume levels that have been the primary source of my woes. One of the main reasons I find myself rebooting back to Windows is so that I can be back in the audio environment. Windows has been perfected to give me ultimate control over all my audio devices, with RealTek's drivers allowing me to duplicate my audio over both my front and back output jacks, monitor my stereo mix on other playback devices, and play with the quality/levels as I please.

by j_s 13y ago

Morgawr 13y ago

Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried (Arch, Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu). When I was running Debian (this was 2 years ago, by the way) I used to need to kill Pulseaudio before launching Jack because the two systems used to conflict and when Jack was running a lot of Pulseaudio applications wouldn't work (so, for example, if you had Jack running you couldn't watch a movie with audio through pulse). Nowadays I use Manjaro as desktop distro and I can just launch qjackctl (or resume a ladish session) without needing to manually stop pulse myself, it's all done automatically and it's really seamless. I use jack only when I'm doing sound production/recording, for everything else Pulseaudio is great.

boyaka 13y ago

All I know is that coming from the Windows world with Stereo Mix and the configurability/stability of recording/playback devices, I have been constantly frustrated with my experience in Ubuntu. There have been a few moments of surprisingly pleasant features, but most of it has been frustrations such as: - Low volume levels, and all the means I have tried to amplify cause quality degradation - Random devices showing up on streaming sites depending on what version of flash I'm running - Complete inability to access certain devices, non-functionality of "monitors" or just confusion about how the hell they work Back during the times I was trying to deal with this I had attempted to switch over to ALSA/OSS or whatever and it was not a pleasant experience. I recall not even being able to get back to the functionality I had with pulseaudio before, and found no improvement on the low volume levels that have been the primary source of my woes. One of the main reasons I find myself rebooting back to Windows is so that I can be back in the audio environment. Windows has been perfected to give me ultimate control over all my audio devices, with RealTek's drivers allowing me to duplicate my audio over both my front and back output jacks, monitor my stereo mix on other playback devices, and play with the quality/levels as I please.