Re: pulseaudio related problems....
+++ Josselin Mouette [2014-02-17 11:06 +0100]:
> Le samedi 15 février 2014 à 22:12 +0100, Salvo Tomaselli a écrit :
> > Well I am now biased against pulseaudio. But let's look at the facts: it comes
> > by default, in the last 3 desktop machines that I've installed, it prevented
> > any audio to be heard.
> > Am I so unreasonable to think that since it comes by default, it should come
> > with a working configuration as well?
>
> The problem is that it is not possible to autodetect everything.
>
> The primary (and AFAIR only) cause of “no sound with PulseAudio” that I
> have encountered is that it doesn’t know whether you want to hear sound
> over the HDMI output or over the jack. Both appear to the system as two
> different devices. So PA just selects one (I haven’t investigated how it
> does the choice) and often gets it wrong.
The main complaint in this thread seems to be 'my sound worked with
ALSA, but installing PA stopped/stops it working'. It seems to me that
PA should try very hard to make sure that whatever output ALSA was using
before is still used when PA is installed. Is there really no way to
determine what that was? Somewhere else in this thread someone said 'if
you have a .asound file then you will lose'. That seems harsh - why
cannot the config in that be used to ensure PA outputs to whatever is
'currently configured'? Shouldn't the presence of such config _help_
make it find the right output and levels?
I am nearly as clueless as Mr Tille about audio and have also
experienced regular problems with no output, no input, wrong audio card,
vol sliders at zero, but I don't know to what degree PA is any worse than
ALSA. I had got the hang of ALSAmixer, just in time for it to no longer
solve my problems. The problem with PA seemed to be an extra layer of
'magic' which was great if it picked the right things, but useless if it
didn't. This thread helped me discover 'pavucontrol' which seems to be
the thing that exposes the 'magic' in question, and has enabled me to
get mic + hangouts working reliably (audio out was already working).
No I haven't filed bugs. Yes I am a bad person, but as remarked
upthread, I don't want to file bugs of the form 'Waaa, my sound doesn't
work', and I don't know enough to say much more useful than that, so I
just assume I'm doing it wrong and one day I'll work out how to get it
going. Maybe there are a lot of us in this situation. Fixing things in
this situation requires tolerance by bug submitters and receivers for
shirtiness and low-quality bug reports, which has not really been in
evidence so far. I hope we can improve on that now that people have a
slightly better understanding of the situation.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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