PulseAudio under the hood
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PulseAudio under the hood
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Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#2He writes: A rich API provides methods for inspecting and controlling all available objects and their run-time and persistent properties. This makes it possible to replace configuration files with GUI tools. Many desktop environments provide such tools.
That is wrong, if I don't misunderstand it. It does not matter much for the possibility of GUI tools whether they talk to an API or whether they parse and write configuration files. That is stuff you abstract away.
It is of course possible that pulseaudio allows settings to be set that didn't exist before. It's API might be better for that - but that doesn't say you couldn't do the same with writing to configuration files if they had the same capabilities, like targeting a specific application (one of the use cases he mentions below).
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#3Pulseaudio definitely needs to be demystified. As an average user it sometimes feels like black magic that sometimes doesn't do the right thing. But in recent years is been leaps and bounds better.
I'm not sure whether that's due to distribution maintainers giving very sane configurations or that pulseaudio development has been focusing on sane defaults.
Eitherway, if you're one of the people involved in giving me a audio experience on Archlinux/Fedora, please pat yourself on the back because you're doing fine work.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#4It took me about a month of on/off attempts to get audio to stop routing through HDMI every time my desktop came out of suspend and I still have a basic understanding on how the audio system works on my machine. While I praise the open source community for everything they've done it's still really hard for even an advanced user to understand how things work. Its flabbergasting at how it has reached this situation.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#5I've never been a fan of PulseAudio, and always remove it and replace it with Jack on my Linux DAW systems, so this article wasn't really of interest to me .. until I started reading it. I think its the first time I've actually had any respect for PulseAudio as a framework .. but I'll be darned if I'm going to ever try to use it again. Jack just works so much better and with far less fuss and overhead .. still, I'm yet to see a "Jack under the hood" article nearly as impressive as this one.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#6It took me about a month of on/off attempts to get audio to stop routing through HDMI every time my desktop came out of suspend and I still have a basic understanding on how the audio system works on my machine. While I praise the open source community for everything they've done it's still really hard for even an advanced user to understand how things work. Its flabbergasting at how it has reached this situation.
Now extrapolate this to the same author's init system that controls how your
machine boots. He didn't become much better programmer since then.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#7Pulseaudio definitely needs to be demystified. As an average user it sometimes feels like black magic that sometimes doesn't do the right thing. But in recent years is been leaps and bounds better. I'm not sure whether that's due to distribution maintainers giving very sane configurations or that pulseaudio development has been focusing on sane defaults. Eitherway, if you're one of the people involved in giving me a…
I've got 20 years of hating audio on Linux at my back, so it's hard to let go of the pain, of which a significant amount was contributed by Pulseaudio. But, I have to agree that we finally (as of a couple years ago) have a good audio experience on Linux. It's good enough to where I don't even think about it anymore. I can even use pro-oriented audio software effectively.
I can also use old devices that don't work on Windows, anymore, of which I own several (a keyboard and an audio interface I'd planned to get rid of, but don't really need to now that I can do most things under Linux). Which is kinda funny...now Linux is more likely to work flawlessly with a given piece of audio equipment than Windows.
If only an official REAPER port would come along (I know it'll run under WINE, but there's also been rumblings of a Linux port for years, and I'd much rather run something that works natively)...
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#8Just a note that PulseAudio maintainer Tanu Kaskinen is on Patreon [1]. He publishes monthly notes on PulseAudio changes there first and wouldn't mind people supporting him via Patreon.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#9It took me about a month of on/off attempts to get audio to stop routing through HDMI every time my desktop came out of suspend and I still have a basic understanding on how the audio system works on my machine. While I praise the open source community for everything they've done it's still really hard for even an advanced user to understand how things work. Its flabbergasting at how it has reached this situation.
That's odd. I found my Linux system always got HDMI audio right while Windows always got it wrong. I seem to recall I was able to force VLC to go to the right place by adding it to a config file, but the system sound never did work right on Windows...I had to manually select HDMI every time it got plugged back in.
Re: PulseAudio under the hood
#10It took me about a month of on/off attempts to get audio to stop routing through HDMI every time my desktop came out of suspend and I still have a basic understanding on how the audio system works on my machine. While I praise the open source community for everything they've done it's still really hard for even an advanced user to understand how things work. Its flabbergasting at how it has reached this situation.
I felt like that when I couldn't configure GNOME to shutdown when I hit the power-button on my chassis, I could only pick to suspend.
It is not possible to change the power settings and it was removed by the GNOME developers[0] (the shutdown/power off action was considered too destructive[1]).
Bottom line: You can no longer power off your laptop by pressing the power off button.
[0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755953
[1] https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/69d9d8...