On 20 May 2014 16:22, David Benfell benfell@parts-unknown.org wrote:
Ian Malone writes:
On 20 May 2014 04:50, David Benfell benfell@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.