PulseAudio info needed

[Mads Kiilerich]

Tom Horsley wrote:
> 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.
>   

You seem to know what you are talking about, so you are probably right. 
If you just want to connect one audio source directly and thus 
exclusively with one audio device and know how to do it then you don't 
want pulseaudio.

Pulseaudio wants to help you managing your audio - and does that by 
managing it for you and mixing all your audio sources and redirecting to 
your audio devices. Take it or leave it. Pulseaudio makes it easy to 
redirect wherever you want and mix all your audio. But if you don't want 
mixing then you don't want pulseaudio.

Yes, we probably also need better documentation of how to disable 
pulseaudio. But the topic of this thread was how to help and support 
pulseaudio. Disabling pulseaudio is the last resort answer to that 
question - and in some cases the right answer.

If you guys want better support for systems without pulseaudio or better 
alternatives to pulseaudio then you have to contribute to that. 
Criticizing pulseaudio won't make it go away.

> 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.
>   

FWIW I don't have your problem. But I use and appreciate the features 
described in the rationale on 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio. Let's make 
sure Fedora keeps working for both usecases!

/Mads