[Fedora-music-list] Call to arms - Fedora Audio Spin

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On 02/21/2012 10:00 PM, Christopher R. Antila wrote:
> On 02/21/2012 03:51 PM, Brendan Jones wrote:
>> On 02/21/2012 09:07 PM, Kyrian wrote:
>>> ...
>>>
>>> - Then I think, ah, wrong kernel, and pulseaudio? But that could
>>> be grouped too, no? Have, say, Jack and have it conflict with
>>> pulseaudio somehow?
>>
>> Pulseaudio is proving to be a pain. Its now an implicit dependency
>> of the default desktop (GNOME) which is unfortunate. Having said
>> all that, I think its a great piece of software, but creates
>> unnecessary complications when all you want to do is
>> create/produce and edit music. There are some applications which
>> refuse to play with anything else now (skype anyone?) that mean
>> people like me have no choice but to coexist with it. I'm still not
>> happy with my setup - other users on this list have also posted
>> their solutions [2]. I think we should aim to ship a
>> pulseaudio-less solution. This means we need to decide on a desktop
>> that's not Gnome - of course that won't make everyone happy, but if
>> we have the comps group like you suggest, those gnome users can
>> still pull in the audio packages with ease.
>
> Something about this seems off.
>
> I remember when it used to be the case that audio cards generally
> wouldn't work by default in Linux. Slowly, eventually, PulseAudio
> solved that. If we remove PulseAudio, we're forcing our users to "go
> it alone." Now, I understand that PulseAudio isn't ideal for audio
> creation software--that's why it uses JACK--but we don't want to throw
> away everything that PulseAudio gained. And surely we want to allow
> people to use GNOME if they want. And Skype. Otherwise we risk running
> into a situation where people enjoy using the Fedora Audio Spin for
> audio-creation tasks, but can't stand it for anything else.

I tend to agree with this if for slightly different reasons. It would be 
an opportunity to squash any bugs that still make PulsAudio less than 
usable.

And add the right configuration files for high channel count soundcards 
(Envy24, RME, etc) so they can be used with PA. And add them to either 
to PA or to ALSA, I don't care, they both keep pointing fingers at each 
other and nobody solves the problem (maybe we could add this to the wish 
list?).

But of course that requires a lot of testing and manpower.

> Recent versions of JACK cooperate better with PulseAudio. Maybe what
> we need is the PulseAudio-->JACK output sink enabled by default. As
> you noted, Simon Lewis recently posted a possible procedure to this list.

There should be a way to turn this on and off easily and at will but I 
personally don't think it should be on by default.

My normal usage of Linux for audio work pretty much requires that the 
connection between PA and Jack not exist by default. I would not want 
random system beeps or web page sounds to intrude into a recording 
session or concert performance. At other times that might be desired or 
required. But the default should be off.

At some point the early history of PA+Jack integration, when it still 
did not quite work (Fedora 10?), I had a perl script that wrapped Jack 
and could optionally start the Jack sinks and sources automatically 
after the Jack startup process, but I never made that the default action.

-- Fernando