Re: PulseAudio (was Re: Sid Foibles)
Le 09.06.2014 15:30, Steve Litt a écrit :
I have no Mental Model of
the Linux sound system, so when my sound goes out, I keep messing
with
everything until I get it fixed. One thing I use a lot of is text
mode
alsamixer. I'll often find something muted.
If I am not wrong, ALSA is a low level ( although wikipedia says that
it includes a high level API ) interface to the kernel, as OSS were (
except that ALSA is linux specific, unlike OSS ). PulseAudio is one of
the multiple layer which are made to "simplify" the use of sound
systems.
But some people here have a lot more knowledge than I have.
Taking a very quick read on French wikipedia, I can see this funny
sentence:
"Ainsi, les applications utilisant ALSA enverront leur sortie son vers
PulseAudio, qui utilisera alors ALSA lui-même pour accéder à la vraie
carte son."
Which means ( roughly, I'm not a translator ):
"So, the softwares which are using ALSA will send their output to
PulseAudio, which will then use ALSA to access the real sound card."
Really, it's fun. But honestly, I really try to keep my system as
lightweight as possible, so *not* using daemons to access an API ( yes,
one daemon is not that big. But one plus one plus one plus yet another
are. Other point: the more code you need to run a software, the more
likely you will meet funny bugs, and daemons are pieces of softwares
which not trivial to write and used by several others, so may insert
bugs in several other programs. Making things hard to fix when there is
a problem, in short ).
I look forward to hearing how other people do or don't work with
PulseAudio (and ALSA) in this thread.
Personally I do not think it is used on my system ( the daemon --
package "pulseaudio" -- is not installed ).
Note for non programmers guys:
An API is the interface a program exposes to other programs.
Reply to: