PulseAudio info needed

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:37:26 -0700
stan <eiqep_eiwo_y at cox.net> wrote:

> And my suggestion is that pulseaudio should be integrated 
> into ALSA.  That is, it becomes invisible to most users

The trouble is, it is really easy to understand why people
could grow to hate ALSA. It is way too low level. For instance
to get a DVD played with the digital sound directly routed
out of the SP/DIF interface on my motherboard, I have to
say this:

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

That is one heck of a lot of cryptic gibberish when what I ought
to be able to do is click a button somewhere that says "Hey! Send
the already encoded digital audio to the digital audio interface".
(Like I can do in Windows, for instance :-).

The problem is, pulseaudio doesn't seem to be solving problems
like this. I can at least spend six weeks searching the web
to finally come up with the gibberish I need to make ALSA work
for this, but as yet, there appears to be no way to make pulseaudio
talk to anything except one primary pair of stereo speakers, and
if you have more audio options than that, forget it.

Combine that with the fact that pulseaudio appears to be desperate
to solve some kind of problem I not only don't have, but can't
understand, and "yum erase pulseaudio" is far and away my best
option.