Re: ALSA instead of pulseaudio on new sid
On 25/01/12 12:37, John Hasler wrote:
> Scott writes:
>> You'll discover the minor pain of learning Pulse is a very profitable
>> investment.
>
> For those of us who are not audiophiles and have very simple audio
> needs, what does Pulse add?
Hi John, a common misconception.
Jackd is for audiophiles (compromising audiophiles)[*1].
If you want to be a "digital" audiophile then everything else is
secondary to your RT, tuned for audio, system - those sorts tend to shun
PulseAudio - despite some populist,uninformed preconceptions.
Pulse is for people with simple audio needs, *and* for those that have
audiophiles aspirations. :-)
I imagine you meant to ask "what are the benefits of Pulse Audio?"
https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/drivers/8100-why-you-should-care-about-pulseaudio-and-how-to-start-doing-it
In case Walter (or I) didn't make it clear - Pulse sits above all your
other, disparate sound systems. It allows them to all work independently
(OSS, ESS, aRTS, ALSA, SDL, JACK, etc) and give's you one place to deal
with all of them. (a sort of benevolent master)
Additionally Pulse gives you true networkable sound - other computers
running pulse can be treated as local sound devices, and vise versa. If
you run VirtualBox/VMware etc, no more fighting for the sound bus.
PulseAudio is platform agnostic - it's also becoming common on
appliances (eg. mobile phones).
You lose nothing - you can still keep ALSA and others - you only lose if
you don't use PulseAudio.
Thanks to the magic of the internet (have you heard of it?) you can find
out more here:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulseaudio
http://www.pulseaudio.org/
http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/doxygen/
[*1] Audiophiles use electrostatic speakers, Class A amplifiers, and
shun the crudities of "digital" sound (apparently).
Cheers, and thanks for your thoughtful question.
--
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