su, 2009-03-08 kello 23:15 +0100, Nigel Henry kirjoitti:
On Sunday 08 March 2009 18:38, Antti J. Huhtala wrote:
Hello Nigel,
could/would you please stop advertising "remove pulseaudio" as the panacea for all audio-related problems? Please? It is not as simple as that.
<snip> I sent my comments to you off-list but now that it's all public I'd like to add a couple of comments.
I do not advocate the removal of pulseaudio to resolve all audio problems.
That's good. Learning how to properly use PulseAudio Volume Control in Applications->Sound & Video solved whatever problems I still had in directing audio streams where I wanted them.
When I see audio related probelms, which may,or may not be related to pulseaudio, I suggest disabling pulseaudio to see if that resolves the audio problem, and that's as far as it goes. if disabling pulseaudio resolves a sound related problem, then all well and good.
If the user now has his/her sounds working, that is all that I'm trying to help with. Personally I have no interest in pulseaudio, as on all my 3 machines the sound works without pulseaudio entering the equation.
That's all right if you only use one audio application at a time. However, sometimes one needs to use more. Here's a quotation from my private mail to another list member:
"I'm attaching a small text file (of 'top') demonstrating successful use of pulseaudio. I had Rhythmbox playing some of my favorite records. This stream was directed to USB headphones. Simultaneously I had totem (actually totem-xine with all the non-free codecs) playing a movie. This stream was directed to loudspeakers through the Ensonic SB sound card. Please note the relatively low average load, even if I have Firefox and some other programs running. Both audio signals were completely free of pops or crackles - and there were no "holes" in the audio output of either. Those holes were plaguing PA all the time when pulseaudio was new to Fedora :-("
I will continue to try and help folks with sound related problems. I do not believe that pulseaudio is necessary for sounds to work, and sounds worked with Alsa long before pulseaudio existed (FC1).
I know that alsamixer already worked well around F7 era or so. Now I need two sound cards working simultaneously with different streams to be used in my SDR (Software-Defined Radio) experiments. I can't see how alsamixer could handle that.
No doubt this will start some flame or other, but is the way I answer sound related problems, whether on Fedora, Debian, or Kubuntu/Ubuntu lists. So so be it.
Well, it has generated a few rather even-tempered comments so far. I doubt that this will develop into a flame war on this list.
To conclude, I understand that if someone - especially a newbie - has trouble getting *any* sounds from his/her system, minimizing the number of possible culprits (such as pulseaudio) can perhaps be justified. Now that PulseAudio has reached a stable state, more often than not the problem is probably elsewhere. Of course, my experience is based only on the hardware I use. It might not be as plain sailing for other HW combinations.
BR, Antti