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. I've been with Fedora since FC4 in June, 2005. I've had my share of "snap, crackle and pop" type audio problems and, if I'm not mistaken, you and I have exchanged a couple of posts around the subject.
I have now an F9 system with one MOBO sound card that utilises the snd_intel8x0 module, an additional Ensoniq ES 1371 (CT-4810) sound card, and C-media USB Headphones. I want and need to be able to use all of them.
In my present system, every audio application works flawlessly from "hearing what and how you want" point of view - and I'm using PulseAudio all the time. "Many moons ago" I was also dissatisfied with the emergency of PA (and there *were* bugs when it first appeared on Fedora). Now I'm very pleased with it, and I'll tell you why.
I've temporarily installed another sound card, an SB Live!, into my box. Pulseaudio lets me direct the audio stream to any of the three, ie. USB headphones, the Ensonic card, or the SB card. (It seems like the mobo sound card is always disabled when an external sound card is installed.) Anyway, the fact that I can arbitrarily choose which sound card will be used to output the sound is something I could not achieve with ALSA.
To me, PulseAudio was a definite improvement over ALSA - for my purposes anyway. Therefore, I'd like to recommend that you wouldn't be too eager to suggest removing PulseAudio to anyone with sound problems. For some of us, PulseAudio - if and when it works impeccably - is indeed an improvement.
I understand that you are a friendly sort of chap who wants to help others. However, helping people to get their PulseAudio work might be a better way of solving their audio problems than single-mindedly suggesting them they should remove PA.
Best regards,
Antti
I do not advocate the removal of pulseaudio to resolve all audio problems.
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.
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).
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.
Nigel.
Nigel Henry wrote:
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.
Try playing sound from 2 or more apps at once on hardware with no hardware mixing (or with hardware mixing not supported by the ALSA driver), it just won't work without PulseAudio (or dmix, which has its own share of compatibility problems).
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).
See above. Back in FC1 when we didn't even have dmix by default, it just didn't work. Play sound in one app and all others will error saying they can't access the sound device.
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.
Sorry, but Fedora uses PulseAudio by default, and it does so for a reason. You're giving out bad advice and telling people to use an unsupported configuration. (In fact when they ask me to help with their sound problems the first thing I'll tell them is to make sure PulseAudio is installed.)
Kevin Kofler
On Sun, 2009-03-08 at 23:23 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Sorry, but Fedora uses PulseAudio by default, and it does so for a reason. You're giving out bad advice and telling people to use an unsupported configuration. (In fact when they ask me to help with their sound problems the first thing I'll tell them is to make sure PulseAudio is installed.)
---- when the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Those that seemed to think they got things working under alsa don't want to have to learn something else.
Craig
On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:23:33 +0100 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Try playing sound from 2 or more apps at once on hardware with no hardware mixing (or with hardware mixing not supported by the ALSA driver), it just won't work without PulseAudio (or dmix, which has its own share of compatibility problems).
Then try making sense out of 2 or more apps playing at once and wonder why anyone cares if it works or not.
Tom Horsley wrote:
Then try making sense out of 2 or more apps playing at once and wonder why anyone cares if it works or not.
One common case: music in the background; system sounds, incoming e-mail / IM / VoIP call alert, game sounds (game without background music) etc. in the foreground.
Kevin Kofler
2009/3/8 Tom Horsley tom.horsley@att.net:
On Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:23:33 +0100 Kevin Kofler wrote:
Try playing sound from 2 or more apps at once on hardware with no hardware mixing (or with hardware mixing not supported by the ALSA driver), it just won't work without PulseAudio (or dmix, which has its own share of compatibility problems).
Then try making sense out of 2 or more apps playing at once and wonder why anyone cares if it works or not.
Case 1) I normally play really really loud Metal or watch American crime dramas to drown out the chatterboxes in my office. I want to hear the pings of a new IM coming in, because it usually means something significant server-wise.
Case 2) I want to hear my VOIP phone ringing over the perfect noise of Rammstein.
and that's just me... there must be thousands of other legitimate use cases!
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
Antti J. Huhtala wrote:
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 have been so far pretty happy with PA, but just wanted to add that these days many Audio hardware are capable of handling multi-streaming. Hopefully PA improves even more and incorporates some of these features. 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.
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 :-).
On Monday 09 March 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
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 :-).
+1000!
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Gene Heskett gene.heskett@verizon.net wrote:
On Monday 09 March 2009, Tom Horsley wrote:
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 :-).
+1000!
Although pulseaudio is capable of sending audio to the digitial out interface it doesn't do any sort of multi-channel audio over digital (i.e. AC3/DTS, etc). What your are talking about is AC3/DTS pass-through. If you tell ALSA properly to pass-through AC3 audio streams then it will completely bypass pulseaudio.
In fact, this is what I do on my MythTV box which coexists happily with pulseaudio. How you get pass-through working is unfortunately something you have to do on a program by program basis. If you list which specific applications you're having trouble with then there is probably someone on the list that can help you.
Richard
On Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:04:46 -0500 Richard Shaw wrote:
If you list which specific applications you're having trouble with then there is probably someone on the list that can help you.
I don't have any trouble after removing pulseaudio
Without removing pulseaudio I could never get mplayer to do the passthrough at all. This script plays DVDs just fine with audio going out to SP/DIF:
amixer set IEC958 unmute amixer set 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' 0 amixer set 'IEC958 Playback Source' PCM exec mplayer dvd://1 -alang en -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -ac hwdts,hwac3, -monitoraspect 16:9 -fs
Then pulseaudio came along, and nothing I tried would get this script to work again until I tried "yum erase pulseaudio" :-).
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Tom Horsley tom.horsley@att.net wrote:
On Mon, 9 Mar 2009 12:04:46 -0500 Richard Shaw wrote:
If you list which specific applications you're having trouble with then there is probably someone on the list that can help you.
I don't have any trouble after removing pulseaudio
Without removing pulseaudio I could never get mplayer to do the passthrough at all. This script plays DVDs just fine with audio going out to SP/DIF:
amixer set IEC958 unmute amixer set 'IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA' 0 amixer set 'IEC958 Playback Source' PCM exec mplayer dvd://1 -alang en -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 -ac hwdts,hwac3, -monitoraspect 16:9 -fs
Then pulseaudio came along, and nothing I tried would get this script to work again until I tried "yum erase pulseaudio" :-).
Just tried "mplayer -ao alsa -ac hwac3, TRANSFORMERS.iso" and it picked the right output automatically. I'm running alsa ver. 1.0.19 and pulseaudio ver. 0.9.14. Not that it matters much you can also use the option -afm hwac3 which will try both AC3 & DTS and you don't need the "," for fallback.
It may be an ALSA driver issue. I remember having more issues when I was running nForce boards with AC97 audio. All my new boards are AMD/ATI chipset with HDA audio and work quite well without much fiddling.
Richard
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Antti J. Huhtala -
Craig White -
Gene Heskett -
Kevin Kofler -
Nigel Henry -
Richard Shaw -
Sam Sharpe -
Suvayu Ali -
Tom Horsley