Re: To pulse or not to pulse?
On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 05:53:34PM -0400, Brad Alexander wrote:
> 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've found jack to be not too bad. It may take a while to set all your
applications to use it, but after that it works well.
Regarding dummy packages, couldn't you also just install pulseaudio but
blacklist modules or remove a startup script? /etc/default/pulseaudio
seems to indicate some ways to prevent it from loading (in Gnome at
least -- in other window managers I don't think it loads automatically
anyway).
-Rob
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