Re: PulseAudio--is there a viable alternative?
Am Montag, 4. Februar 2013 schrieb Kelly Clowers:
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 8:28 AM, "Morel Bérenger"
>
> <berenger.morel@neutralite.org> wrote:
> >> Pure ALSA works fine if you only need one sound at a time and don't
> >> need/want stuff like per source volume, and don't mind Flash sometimes
> >> messing up and blocking all access to the sound card.
> >
> > I think you are speaking about OSS here, not about alsa.
> > Alsa is able to play more than one soud/music at a time without
> > problem: I can perfectly play wesnoth with sound+music and have mpd
> > running background. (of course, I usually disable wesnoth's music, but
> > not it's sounds)
>
> Nope, I am talking about ALSA. ALSA can only play more than one source
> at a time with its dmix utility (ALSA itself is fundamentally unable
> to do mixing) , but I have never, ever seen dmix work at all.
Here it just works out of the box.
And since trying to use Pulseaudio created more than three different issues I
did not have *without* Pulseaudio I removed it again.
1) Sometimes doesn´t get that USB soundcard is available and I have to
replug it several times.
2) Unless in system mode I can not have two sessions open with one of it
playing music, cause Pulseaudio stops the playing music on session switch.
And no, this is not configurable. And no, Pulseaudio developers do not care
for this use case.
3) When in system mode on search update the start pulseaudio scripts are
replaced again. And consequently they start Pulseaudio even when its already
running system wide.
4) When playing back DVDs with VLC audio starts 5 to 10 seconds after video.
Even with rtkit installed. Purging Pulseaudio made music playback synchron
to video in an instant.
5) When playing back music with my old Amarok machine, a ThinkPad T23, I had
music being stuck for more than 5 seconds. And yes, rtkit also installed
there. This has almost completely gone by just using Phonon VLC with ALSA
directly. There may still be a occassional sound drop of a second or so, but
nowhere as worse as before.
I do not want to become a scientist to just get my audio to work.
All of this issues are fixable by just purging Pulseaudio from my system.
The complete lack of any feedback on my bug reports makes the think that it
does not make sense for my to try out Pulseaudio anytime soon.
I like systemd, it works for me. But for my user experience Pulseaudio is a
"apt-get purge" candidate. I don´t want to mess with it and I do not want to
invest hours to get something as simple as fluent audio playback. (Yes,
Pulseaudio got my piece of crap award at some time. Heck, I had some apt-get
install / apt-get purge cycles with Network Manager cause for some time it
didn´t work either. In the meanwhile Network Manager works just nice for me,
since version 0.9 of it. I still hope that either a future version of
Pulseaudio will work for me or KDE will continue to not require it.)
Is this a rant? Yes it is. But at least I stated what my concrete issues
were.
Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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