Re: PulseAudio
On 07/17/2013 10:48 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
So have I, with alsa. Mainly because I've never had any problem with
alsa beyond "my hardware is shiny new and the driver hasn't been written
yet". Okay, and there was also this one time where I wanted to figure
out how you enable analog 5.1 surround sound. I've never been able to do
that with PulseAudio, mind you.
Alsa is a completely different layer in the sound stack. It doesn't even
make sense to compare these two.
PulseAudio piles another layer of possible failures on top of a kernel
driver, and hides most of the audio mixer for no particularly good
reason other than "it might confuse the poor user". It just doesn't make
any sense to me.
Some sound cards expose two dozens or more level adjustments which most
people don't even understand. I don't think it's a bad idea in general
to clean that up and make the whole interface more consistent and
easier to understand.
Also, your sound setup probably just consists of one sound card in your
desktop/laptop PC which sure enough works just fine with only Alsa.
However, if you have more than one sound device, PulseAudio is a
blessing. For example, my video card has an HDMI output. When
I hook up my PC to my television via HDMI, I want the sound from
VLC to go through HDMI rather than through my sound card. It's
a matter of opening a preferences pane, change the output device
to HDMI and I am done.
How do I do that with just plain Alsa without using a text editor?
What do I do when I want my Skype input going through the USB
webcam's microphone and the audio of Skype through my bluetooth
headset instead of my primary sound card?
I am sorry, but in my eyes, people who claim that PulseAudio is useless
simply don't realize that there can be sound setups which are a little
more sophisticated than just a single sound card and configuring
these can be PITA when you don't have PA.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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