Pulse audio to use or not to use?

FizzyWidget · Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 2:13 pm Post subject: Pulse audio to use or not to use?

Have been reading about this at a few other sites and some say to use while others don't, i notice in gentoo its always set to -pluseaudio but that doesnt always mean much as we can add it if we like.

Some have said this is going to replace alsa while others have said its to be used with alsa, so i am a bit confused as there seems to be conflicting statements, is there any need for me to have pulseaudio installed? will it offer me any benefits to having it in or not having it in?
_________________
I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

sebaro · Veteran Joined: 03 Jul 2006 Posts: 1141 Location: Romania

ALSA is the sound system, it provides the sound card modules. PulseAudio is a sound server used by applications for accessing the sound card at the same time, audio mixing. Alsa has dmix which does the same but lacks some PA features.

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

FizzyWidget · Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2010 6:26 pm Post subject:

so is that a yes or a no ;-)

if yes i have a bit of compiling to do, if not i have a bit of spare time

_________________
I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

bernd_b · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Nov 2003 Posts: 148

I've never missed pulseaudio in my desktop live until now.

If someone can tell me what lack of features I suffer from, I am eager to hear of it

gcyoung · Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 2:08 pm Post subject: Pulseaudio

Had never used pulseaudio until recently when I swapped from kde to gnome which installed it automatically.
I'm not aware of any difference or improvement, so I'd vote for leaving things as they are!

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

PulseAudio is the first thing I disable on any Ubuntu system. Dunno if it's the fault of PA or of the way it's set up in Ubuntu, but it causes problems with so many applications and offers nothing in return, so that disabling it is the best choice.

yngwin · Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 4:20 pm Post subject:

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Well, Ubuntu is well known for incorrect pulseaudio integration - it's a distro, not pulseaudio problem
(at least for the most part).

zebrapad · Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2010 6:56 pm Post subject:

It promises seamless integration with existing applications.

Question: is this true ?
Is it really as simple as adding USE flag "pulseaudio" ... and doing a "emerge --newuse world" ?
Knowing ALSA and OSS were never *that* easy, I am wondering if that can be true.
_________________
specs that may be relevant to my post: AMD Phenom II X3 720, NVidia GTX260, Gentoo Linux 64bit 2008.0, GCC 4.4.1, -march=amdfam10 -O2 -pipe

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2605

I personally have no use for it either, and I haven't met anyone that does. Therefore, my recommendation would be that you don't need it. Note that that is my personal opinion.
_________________
“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
---avatar cropped from =AimanStudio---

M · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2006 Posts: 432

I tried to use pulseaudio because gnome mixer applet now needs it, but I killed it after a one week, and for just a couple of days it managed to fill my hard disc with error logs, about 10gb of logs

. Problem was with gdbm version or something like that but no app should behave like that. And it writes something everywhere, /tmp, /var, ~/.pulse , cache, what a f... I just want to play some music and have control over volume but if you expect some magic to happen when you plug in headphones or similar then try it, it is simple to remove it after all.
I only need alsa, and no, pulseaudio will not replace alsa, all sound servers, frameworks etc. use alsa, this picture explain it better -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/linuxaudio.png . Those who miss sound applet in gnome can try some of the alternatives https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-810701.html .

smlgbl · Guru Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 305

Well, I have a nice little netbook and a server that runs mpd with my music collection. Netbook is gentoo, server is ubuntu, headless. Right after the ubuntu install i right away uninstalled the pulseaudio stuff because it was messing things up. After some time now I want to play the sound of apps on my netbook using the stereo the server is connected to - which brings me back to pulseaudio. It kinda works now, after some fiddling I managed to get mpd and pa work together nicely. So the former functionality is there again, but the new stuff, like watching youtube on the netbook and listening to the sound on the server/stereo doesn't work reliably yet, that is the sound gets garbled after some time or speeds up or is just off timewise. I'd really like that functionality, whereas the control over the streams and sinks and sources and input and outputs is confusing, especially when all you wanna do is turn the volume down...
_________________
samuel.
'Do not let one girding on boast about himself like one unfastening'

VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

@M: that was not pulseaudio problem,... well not really.
It could handle it more gracefully.

The problem lied in recent gdbm upgrade - search bugzilla for the closed bug.

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

Always had problems with it on Ubuntu machines, and it's completely unneeded. So that's a big fat no

aCOSwt · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 8:52 am Post subject:

@#[@!! I wish Carps had had the initiative for that thread before I stupidly set that :evil:

@#@@!! pulseaudio use flag ! :evil:

I am now dealing with :evil:

@"@##! ununderstandable (by me) error log messages on KDE4 launch !
Wanting to get rid of these, I now try to prevent KDE4 from starting pulseaudio on startup !
I just cannot find my way !
1/ Isn't there any other method for this than unsetting the use flag and emergeing --newuse ?
2/ Should I open another thread or go on polluting this interesting one ?
:evil:

@¹#"##@@!! :evil:

BTW... the only half-intelligent thing I can say on-topic (and that I should have known before) is that I do not know if pulseaudio is useful or not but it is at least unusable under KDE4 with default settings as pulseaudio's plugin for Xine is actually-definitely-absolutely more than unreliable and as phonon, as default, uses... the Xine backend !
(Note that this is *not* an opinion... :wink:

)

"Much more advanced than esd" they are officially writing !! pffff ! :evil:

I should rather have read :"not on the top of the dustbin !"

djselbeck · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 32 Location: Germany

You shouldn't judge Pulseaudio with ubuntu. Ubuntu has really bad support for it. If you want to see a good Distribution with pulseaudio try Fedora. I think it is really a great piece of software and shoud not be avoided any more. At the beginning pulseaudio had some issues and have some right now , no question, but I think Pulseaudio is going to the right direction for Sound on Linux Desktop.

For example Pulseaudio enables me to play music and youtube Videos on my Netbook but the sound plays over my stereo connected to my desktop PC. Other things I use are change samplerate without killing playing clients with pactl. There is no way you can do this with alsa without killing the playing application.

If you haven't use pulseaudio for sometime lets say after the 0.9.19 or 0.9.21 release you should eventually retry it and don't judge without retrying because there were a lot of deep changes.

greets

FizzyWidget · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 2:24 pm Post subject:

yther · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 5:17 pm Post subject:

Say what you will about Pulseaudio, but for me it was the answer to the question, "How can I get Firefox (Flash), Amarok, Wine, and KDE in general to all play nice and not hog the sound output?" This box is nearly a year old and until a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled on someone's helpful forum post about configuring Pulse with ALSA, I could only have sound from one app at a time. Now everything finally works as it should, and I am happy. :mrgreen:

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

yther · Posted: Wed Feb 03, 2010 7:22 pm Post subject:

djselbeck · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 32 Location: Germany

Yeah Software Mixing works but other things I can do with PA i cant do without it like i said before.

haarp · Guru Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 535

truc · Advocate Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 3199