Re: To pulse or not to pulse?
On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:57:58 -0400, Brad Alexander wrote:
>
> (...)
>
>> So I tried to like pulse, tried to get along with it, but I'm having a
>> really hard time with it. I am running sid with kde 4.x, and, to give
>> one example (there are several I have noticed), when playing music with
>> Amarok, every time a screen issue happens (e.g. when the screen saver
>> kicks in, or when the track changes and Amarok kicks up a dialog with
>> the name/artist of the next track, the sound goes wonky and sounds like
>> it is underwater. Sometimes this will clear up on its own after a few
>> minutes, but other times it doesn't or I want it fixed
>> immediately...Then I can slide the master volume down and back up in
>> kmix (sometimes it takes twice). Very frustrating.
>>
>> Now, I did a little research a couple of weeks ago, and found on the
>> Ubuntu wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/) that they recommend
>> installing several extra pulse-related packages. Is it worth it? Will it
>> fix my problems? Or is it not worth the effort and should I just nuke
>> pulse from orbit? (It's the only way to be sure...)
>
> Ask yourself if you really need PA in your system.
I'm just as happy using straight alsa and building a dummy package.
However, two things that come to mind are a) what happens when/if pa
becomes the standard and b) are there any interesting things I can do
with it (e.g. multiplexing/balancing sound). If I can do b) without
PA, so much the better. I'm thinking worst case, jack, but that didn't
have a lot of docs, last time I checked.
> I'm very happy with the old ESD and still have not found a hard
> requirement for using a different sound server although I know that PA
> will be in my systems when I install wheezy but nothing I will do on
> purpose.
>
> That said, I guess the integration of PA with KDE will be better with the
> latest versions and Sid should be now at 4.8 thus troubles with PA should
> be less.
This is what I thought when I did the reinstall of Debian. However, it
appears not to be the case.
> Regarding your question of "keeping PA or not" I would give it a chance,
> read the official docs¹ and if nothing helps to alleviate the cranky-
> underwater sound and problems persist I would then reconsider my
> decision. KDE users can be considered lucky if PA is not a hard
> dependency for them :-)
>
> ¹http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Desktops/KDE
Thanks, Camaleón. I will go read this. Right now, I'm leaning toward
pulling PA and putting a dummy package in place. Again, being a future
requirement is still a concern, since generally, my Debian installs
have a life expectancy of 5-7 yrs.
Thanks,
--b
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