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Kaste
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 29, 2013 9:12 am    Post subject: Several Pulse Audio problems Reply with quote

Hello Folks,

I wanted to reroute all audio over network and thus finally bit the bullet that is pulse. Now while it is working pretty well 80% of the time, it has a surprisingly large number of issues the rest of the time. I was wondering if I could possibly have misconfigured it in some way.

For example sometimes there is no audio, but when I restart the client then it starts back up. Sometimes when I start a new app the alsavolume is muted, which pulse doesn't seem to notice and the lxde mixer applett doesn't pick up either.

Sometimes alsamixer shows one mixer, sometimes multiple, but pulse is running the whole time(ps aux|grep pulse confirms it) so only the former should happen.

Sometimes pulse seems congested in some way and clients just hang waiting for an answer, stopping the playback of vlc mplayer and the like and freezing pactl and pavucontrol. Interestingly enough it also freezes alsamixer which I thought impossible, since alsa's mixers reside below Pulse right? One time I got a message popup saying something about client callback timeout for a local client in this situation.
Since I started using pulse, skype is also starting to act up, using 100% cpu sometimes and freezing up. Since it manages to hang all sorts of other client's and the fact that it coincides with pulse I am somewhat confident that this isn't skype's fault for once.

Sometimes single mixers reset themselves to different values without any discernible (to me at least) reson.

A few times when I played sound over the network, the client started without errors but is not picked up by the server, so no output and pactl and pavucontrol don't list it as a client.


Also when I play sound over the network with low to average network load I see some ridiculously large latencies (order of several seconds) which makes watching video with this pretty annoying.

I'd love to fix these or ditch pulse and use something that works. So I'd be really grateful if someone could show me how to fix pulse.
I read about sndio which looks good because it at least has libao support, so it should be possible to reroute most stuff through there, but I haven't found a good documentation so far. esd support seems to be going away. Is there something else that does this kind of network transparent audio or a good guide for sndio somewhere?
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PaulBredbury
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PostPosted: Fri Aug 30, 2013 2:10 am    Post subject: Re: Several Pulse Audio problems Reply with quote

Kaste wrote:
freezes alsamixer which I thought impossible, since alsa's mixers reside below Pulse right?

You've compiled pulseaudio into alsa-plugins, so pulseaudio becomes e.g. alsamixer's default card. To get back to a hardware card:

Code:
alsamixer -c0

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Kaste
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 02, 2013 10:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks Paul, looking at it this way, makes more sense. Thank you.

I got a bit of new information. The muting seems to happen less random than I thought. I mute it myself via a deliberate or accidental middle click on the lxde volume and correcting it does make the sign go away, but does not change the fact that the alsavolume is still muted. If you restart X or reboot then the state is also not reflected, so no visual sign again but still muted.

That still leaves me with a bunch of others :/. The hangups seem to become more frequent and start to increase my confusion, mainly in conjunction with flash and firefox. From my understanding all flash applets in firefox run in the same process space consistent with the fact that there is only one mixer in pulse for all of them, but I yesterday had an occasion where one would play sound but the other woudn't and I have reason to believe it normally would work.
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