Re: Pulseaudio

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Ter, 2007-10-09 at 01:17 +0200, Matteo Settenvini wrote:
> Il giorno lun, 08/10/2007 alle 23.19 +0100, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro ha
> scritto:
> > Last time I tried PulseAudio (over a year ago) it hogged the sound
> > device and did not let any other ALSA client produce sound.
> > 
> > Can someone confirm the bug is still there?  Just (e.g.) play some music
> > with PulseAudio and then start an ALSA client, check that mixing is
> > being done.
> > 
> > If the bug is still there then I would not recommend anyone using
> > PulseAudio.  Unless you want to see for example your flash plugin sound
> > to stop working, like it didn't usually work in the old days when it
> > used OSS API.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Pulseaudio can do much better than dmix in my opinion. The only thing
> you need is to tell alsa to use pulse as pcm.!default and ctl.!default,
> after having installed the relative ALSA plugin.
> 
> The ALSA plugin is quite stable and works well for me.
> 
> As for Macromedia Flash 9, it is well known it is a buggy proprietary
> software with quite a lot of problems. People jumped at it, anyway, and
> now Pulseaudio has an extra library you can install to have Flash
> working seamlessly. Much better than with ESD, imho.

I don't care only about proprietary applications.  You think for example
that Second Life Linux client (which is open source) will use Pulse
Audio API directly?  It will take years before that happens.  I remember
perfectly well how much time it took for applications to switch from OSS
to ALSA, after Linux declared ALSA the official "blessed" Linux sound
API.

I loved Pulse Audio when I tried it, but when I noticed it blocked the
audio device I immediately had to stop using it.

It's good that there's an ALSA plugin to redirect sounds to the Pulse
Audio daemon, although I must confess it doesn't sound entirely
satisfactory.  Why be forced to use a userspace mixing program when
hardware mixing would work equally well (or better) in most situations?
Non-network audio should not need to be mixed by Pulse Audio on Linux,
IMHO.

  Is there any good reason why Pulse Audio explicitly locks the audio
device, unlike any other normal ALSA  client?  And no, making every app
use Pulse Audio by force, just because you can, is not a good reason.

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
INESC Porto, Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit
"The universe is always one step beyond logic." -- Frank Herbert