So has anyone gotten their sound to work since it broke a few days ago?

[Ian Malone]

On 20 May 2014 16:22, David Benfell <benfell at parts-unknown.org> wrote:
> Ian Malone writes:
>
>> On 20 May 2014 04:50, David Benfell <benfell at parts-unknown.org> wrote:
>>
>>> But even
>>> so, unless you have a specialized need for Pulseaudio, which apparently
>>> may
>>> include very high-end audiophile applications, removing it seems
>>> generally
>>> harmless.
>>
>>
>> High end audiophile applications like having more than one sound
>> source running at a time?
>
>
> I'm sorry. I can't answer this adequately. It's what came up the last time I
> saw this discussion.
>
> Apparently, and I'm clearly not anywhere near enough of an audiophile to
> understand what they were going on about, pulseaudio does make some sound
> capabilities that matter a lot to musicians--which I think *did* include
> mixing--and other people who really care about extremely high fidelity
> sound. It was, for me, a jaw-dropping conversation that required me to
> acknowledge that as much as I think I care about high quality sound, I was
> completely out of my league.
>
> I'd point you to the right list if I remembered which it was. And I think
> it'll be hard to find via Google because usually discussions about
> pulseaudio and its necessity devolve into flame wars.
>

That sounds more like Jack, where latency and multiple stream handling
is important. Neither Jack nor PA particularly help with high fidelity
sound, good hardware does that. (There is a slight factor in how
sample rate and depth conversion is handled.)

I was really referring to the fact in 'the bad old days' it was
necessary to halt or even shut-down one application that was playing
sound before another could. The normal response to this is 'but I only
listen to one thing at a time!'. Which is not really true if, for
example you want to have skype running but listen to music, or use
flash at all. There was a brief attempt to fix this with alsa dmix
settings, but it's pretty inflexible.


-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk