On Lu, 09 iun 14, 09:30:01, Steve Litt wrote: > > I look forward to hearing how other people do or don't work with > PulseAudio (and ALSA) in this thread. I'll try to explain it simply, but I have a feeling this will turn out quite long: ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is the kernel driver part plus a library. In an ideal world it would be all you need to have sound, but: - by default ALSA would not do software mixing (and most consumer grade sound cards don't have a hardware mixer) - the dmix plugin had (still has?) various quirks and limitations and for a long time was not enabled by default Because of this in addition to ALSA on most systems one would also need a sound server to do software mixing: aRts for KDE, esd for Gnome, JACK for profesional audio (Ralf's domain). Unfortunately at this point http://xkcd.com/927/ happened, so instead of taking one (JACK would have been a good idea probably) and improving it to do whatever was missing some guy(s) thought it would be a good idea to create a new sound server (pulseaudio). The good: - aRts and esd died - most (all) user applications now have native pulseaudio support, so the fake ALSA sink that is used for programs without pulseaudio support will probably go away soon. - pulseaudio has interesting additional features, some of them even useful >:) The bad: - it adds complexity, especially now that ALSA + dmix mostly works for the common use (have two applications play sounds at the same time) - when it doesn't work it's difficult to find out why. - it's not performant enough to also replace JACK. Professional audio is probably not pulseaudio's goal, but if we've got to have a sound server I'd rather we had only one that works properly for all use cases. The ugly: - sound not working seems to be happening especially when pulseaudio is installed afterwards (e.g. as dependency of a new application) as opposed to new installations. Since removing it quite often magically makes sound work again not many people bother to understand what happened or even just file (useful) bug reports. Hope this explains, Andrei -- http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic http://nuvreauspam.ro/gpg-transition.txt
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