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> Can anyone give a (brief) explanation as to the background of the controversy? Remember the stability, flexibility and reliability that PulseAudio brought to

by wtbob 12y ago

> Can anyone give a (brief) explanation as to the background of the controversy? Remember the stability, flexibility and reliability that PulseAudio brought to Linux audio? Imagine that in your boot process. I wonder if Lennart Poettering is secretly funded by a consortium of Microsoft, Apple and IBM.

oblio 12y ago
Is PulseAudio causing anyone problems these days?
- ddalex 12y ago
  Yep, to me, all the time. Number one pet peeve - I can't disable mic auto-volume. Number two - if you don't run Gnome, you're screwed having to resort to very complex, not-self-documenting command line tools to do the simplest of stuff. How do I change the volume of the box from the command line ? Number 3 - everytime I plug my laptop's DisplayPort into a TV (used for presentations here), PA routes the audio automatically over the TV. But when I plug it out, the sounds happly continues into the depths of /dev/null, and I have yet to find a way to re-route it to my headphones without killing the PA daemon. And I can continue. PA works ok only if you if you run Gnome, and you never plug in/out audio devices. It's a horrible software piece, but I'm stuck with it because it's not my priority to write audio daemon replacements.
  - mercurial 12y ago
    > Number two - if you don't run Gnome, you're screwed having to resort to very complex, not-self-documenting command line tools to do the simplest of stuff. How do I change the volume of the box from the command line ? You can use pavucontrol without Gnome. Don't know what command-line tools, if any, are available for Pulse Audio.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    make it a priority to install Cadence/JACK on your debian machine, and make PulseAudio it's slave. you'll thank me later.
- wtbob 12y ago
  I still can't have multiple login sessions properly sharing audio, and for some reason sometimes different sessions start using the wrong audio output.
- upofadown 12y ago
  If you have a system with more than stereo (say 5.1) then by default pulseaudio upmixes all sources with fewer channels by simply duplicating all the channels on the same side and mixing everything to the centre channel. This makes it impossible to listen to music recorded with any meaningful stereo separation. The workaround is to mute all the extra channels. There is an option to disable upmixing entirely but that triggers at least a couple of bugs. One involves the VU meter indications (shrug). The other causes pulseaudio to emit silence instead of mono streams (fatal). This bug has been open for over a decade now. At least one patch has been submitted and shrugged off. If you look at the tracker you will see lots of bugs like these where knowledge of the entire system is required to fix them. What seems to have happened is that once the original developers left, some bugs became eternal.

by wtbob 12y ago

oblio 12y ago

Is PulseAudio causing anyone problems these days?

ddalex 12y ago
Yep, to me, all the time. Number one pet peeve - I can't disable mic auto-volume. Number two - if you don't run Gnome, you're screwed having to resort to very complex, not-self-documenting command line tools to do the simplest of stuff. How do I change the volume of the box from the command line ? Number 3 - everytime I plug my laptop's DisplayPort into a TV (used for presentations here), PA routes the audio automatically over the TV. But when I plug it out, the sounds happly continues into the depths of /dev/null, and I have yet to find a way to re-route it to my headphones without killing the PA daemon. And I can continue. PA works ok only if you if you run Gnome, and you never plug in/out audio devices. It's a horrible software piece, but I'm stuck with it because it's not my priority to write audio daemon replacements.
- mercurial 12y ago
  > Number two - if you don't run Gnome, you're screwed having to resort to very complex, not-self-documenting command line tools to do the simplest of stuff. How do I change the volume of the box from the command line ? You can use pavucontrol without Gnome. Don't know what command-line tools, if any, are available for Pulse Audio.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  make it a priority to install Cadence/JACK on your debian machine, and make PulseAudio it's slave. you'll thank me later.
wtbob 12y ago
I still can't have multiple login sessions properly sharing audio, and for some reason sometimes different sessions start using the wrong audio output.
upofadown 12y ago
If you have a system with more than stereo (say 5.1) then by default pulseaudio upmixes all sources with fewer channels by simply duplicating all the channels on the same side and mixing everything to the centre channel. This makes it impossible to listen to music recorded with any meaningful stereo separation. The workaround is to mute all the extra channels. There is an option to disable upmixing entirely but that triggers at least a couple of bugs. One involves the VU meter indications (shrug). The other causes pulseaudio to emit silence instead of mono streams (fatal). This bug has been open for over a decade now. At least one patch has been submitted and shrugged off. If you look at the tracker you will see lots of bugs like these where knowledge of the entire system is required to fix them. What seems to have happened is that once the original developers left, some bugs became eternal.