On Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:34:32 -0700 Suvayu Ali wrote:
Not many have multiple cards, but most do have these multi-stream capable audio hardware. They come in pretty handy if you actually use your desktop as your primary home multimedia device.
Yep. The main reason I always remove pulseaudio is the apparent total inability to send already encoded sound (like a DVD soundtrack) to the SP/DIF optical output on my motherboard's sound interface. I spent weeks decrypting the ALSA gibberish required to get this working, then pulseaudio wiped out all the work. If it can do it, then it needs a better mixer interface to show how to do it, if it can't do it, it needs to be able to before it can replace ALSA for me.
In fact, I suspect what linux needs far more than pulseaudio is a layer on top of ALSA that sorts all the hardware specific gibberish ALSA names like "IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA" into something more meaningful and provides some explanation for why I have 27 "simple" ALSA sound controls when my motherboard has only 7 sound related connectors :-).