PulseAudio info needed

[Mads Kiilerich]

Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> Anne Wilson wrote:
>> There is a lot of FUD and general mistrust of PA.  

Yes. But I think it is honest "FUD".

It is my experience that PulseAudio generally just works and in most 
setups makes it much easier to configure sound. But, obviously, with 
higher level of abstraction it gets harder to debug problems in the 
hidden layers.

Unfortunately it seems like the experience with the new PulseAudio on 
some systems really _is_ more glitches and higher cpu load.

The rewritten PulseAudio sound server utilizes new features from the 
low-lovel audio drivers, and currently it reveales that there is 
problems with some kernel / alsa drivers. PulseAudio might have trigged 
the problems, but now it is just the messenger about problems that must 
be fixed elsewhere.

>> It seems to me that it would help a great deal if someone would write 
>> a short statement about what PA is and how it should work.  If there 
>> is known readable references, they would help too, as would noting 
>> any known work-arounds for problem.
>>
>> It would be a great help to those of us who try to give user 
>> support.  I'd even put it on my own web space and direct folk to it, 
>> if that would help.
>
> There's a lot of good information on the PulseAudio project pages 
> themselves:
>
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/AboutPulseAudio
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FirstSteps
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup
> http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/FAQ
>
> Maybe someone would be interested in summarising some of this and 
> adding Fedora-specifics on the Fedora wiki to make it a bit less 
> intimidating for novice users?

I think shomething should be said on 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F10Common - but I don't know what ;-)

On the systems where it works it just works and there isn't much to say 
about it and no big need for more documentation. And obviously it 
_should_ work on all systems.

If it doesn't work then it is a bug which should be filed and fixed. 
Unfortunately there seems to be a backlog with that. (See for example 
the list on 
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/bugs/pulseaudio and 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462026)

/Mads