Re: PulseAudio
On 18-07-13 06:23, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 07/18/2013 01:00 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> They're both APIs that applications can use to produce audio. What do
>> you mean, it doesn't make sense?
>>
>> Of course they're not the same thing; I get that. That's not what I'm
>> saying. But as far as "producing audio" is concerned, they can both do
>> that.
>
> PulseAudio is not a stand-alone thing, it doesn't work without an
> actual abstraction layer for the sound hardware like ALSA.
>
> When you compare PA, you should compare it with artsd, esd, dmix
> or JACK, but not the low-level layer below.
No, you compare it against "the alternative", whatever that is. To me,
"the alternative" is bare alsa. And in my opinion, PulseAudio is not an
improvement.
>>>> 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've never seen a setup where there wasn't a "master" mixer.
>
> Which often doesn't help if some other adjustment has been turned off
> or set to a very low level.
If that is the case, usually it's fairly easy to spot.
[...]
>>> 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.
>>
>> Not contesting that. It's just that every time pulseaudio got pulled
>> onto my system, my audio stopped doing what it was supposed to. That's
>> not what I would expect from something that's supposed to make things
>> "easier to understand".
>
> Could you please stop coming up with anecdotes and actually describe
> some real situations where PulseAudio messed up due to a bug?
That would require me to investigate something I don't like, when a
working solution is simply "apt-get remove pulseaudio"
For clarity, since I have a feeling you may be misunderstanding me: I'm
not saying we should ditch PulseAudio, and I'm not saying we should
change our defaults. However, I personally think PulseAudio is an
annoying piece of software that does more harm than it does good, and
I'd hate it if we were to end up with a system where removing PulseAudio
is no longer possible.
>>> 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.
>>
>> That's something you can do with plain alsa, too.
>
> I have no doubt that you can do it in ALSA as well. The question is,
> however, whether it involves a 20-hour heart surgery as opposed to
> just opening a panel with PA and changing the default output for
> a specific application.
Oh come on, don't be ridiculous. It's really not that hard.
[...]
>>> How do I do that with just plain Alsa without using a text editor?
>>
>> In VLC:
>>
>> ctrl-p, go to the audio tab, and select the correct device in the
>> "output" frame.
>>
>> That's not VLC-specific, FWIW; most applications that can do alsa output
>> have a way to select the output device. There are exceptions, of course,
>> but those applications are either immature or buggy.
>
> Which means there is no canonical way to do it, and, like you said not
> every application supports such an option.
I also called those exceptions "either immature or buggy". They're far
and few between.
> Do I really elaborate why a central control panel to configure that is
> the superior solution instead of having to figure out for each and
> every application how to do it?
Again, there's no reason why such a control panel can't be a simple
frontend to an asoundrc file.
>> Even so, there's no reason why there can't be a tool to edit an asoundrc
>> file... but you don't really need that, in my experience, since most
>> applications allow you to choose the correct output device.
>
> Again, *most* is not all and no, I don't want my mother to open up
> a text editor and having to write some obscure text lines in order
> for her to get the audio on her television after she connected it
> to her television.
She doesn't have to.
> Do you know how hard that is to explain something
> on the phone to someone who is not a computer aficionado?
I used to work on an ISP helpdesk when I was in my last year of college...
>>> 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?
>>
>> You select the correct input and output devices in skype...
>
> Ha! I am pretty sure you haven't used Skype and ALSA extensively
> in the past.
One of my customers used skype pretty extensively for communication with
their other site across the ocean, so, actually, I have.
> You just don't select the proper output and input devices in
> Skype. You actually have to go to ALSA mixer and tell ALSA
> that you actually want to *record* from the microphone
> connected to the front panel or the back panel. Otherwise the
> signal is just passed through the sound card meaning you can hear
> your voice but Skype does not record it.
"buggy or immature"
Anyway, EOT for me.
--
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.
If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.
-- http://xkcd.com/1133/
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