On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 06:28:47AM +0100, mick.crane wrote: > On 2022-08-18 08:39, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: [...] > > TBH you packed two questions into your original mail. Complaining that > > most people concentrate on one is kinda... well ;-) > > I don't mean to appear am complaining. No sweat. I put a smiley on there, I was half-in-jest... > Mention of teenage Guru was attempted humour. ...as you were, it seems :-D > There were 2 question marks but really one question. > "Is there a numpty's explanation what are these PulseAudio, Alsa, Jack?" > Noticed had sound from the speakers when selecting Pulseaudio as Audio > System but then doing that again I had no sound. ALSA is the basic infrastructure: it includes the kernel drivers. What Pulse and Jack provide is the "sound daemon", a user-space software component which can mix sounds from different sources, and do other user friendly (that's the intention, at least) things. For example overlaying a warning sound from your desktop environment over the heavy metal you're currently listening to, or remembering the settings for different output hardware, or sending the sound over the network, or... Jack focuses on low latency, which is especially important for musical pros, where 20ms of latency do hurt. > Have no idea what an Audio System is. > I have found the Ardour6 manual. Ardour uses one of the above back ends. > The install system looks to have put me and pulse in audio group. > Ardour manual is saying this is possibly not a good idea because only one > person can access soundcard at a time. This is the problem sound daemons try to solve. They sit on your sound card and talk (hopefully) to the different applications. > There may be an explanation why second attempt had no sound output because > something had the soundcard because of user error. There are many variables involved there: is your Ardour trying to talk directly to the hardware and a sound daemon (pulse?) sitting on it? Getting rid of the sound daemon or telling Ardour to talk to it might solve the problem. So to approach the thing, you'd have to look at your ardour's settings *and* do a `ps' to search for your sound daemon (if any) *and* look at its settings (pavuctrl is reportedly a front end to pulse -- I don't know for sure, because I don't use it). And perhaps other things. Yes, it's messy :-) Cheers -- t
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