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PulseAudio under the hood

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Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#21

Post by madez »

I use headphones, and have tactile transducers on my chair. The transducers make the audio sound much louder than it actually is. That is good for your ears and your neighbours.

Because of this setup I need full-range stereo output on my headphones and low-passed LFE for the transducers.

How can I do this PulseAudio? When I enable lfe-remixing, I get full-range output on my transducers and I hear voices in my chair. If I set lfe-crossover-freq, I lose the bass on my headphones.

I found this patch

https://pw-emeril.freedesktop.org/patch/171424/

which seems solve the problem, but it was rejected.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#22

Post by SwellJoe »

nolok wrote: post #13
SwellJoe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You had the wrong default selected in Windows mixer. Need to select it as default when plugged and whenever it gets replugged it retake its priority. Works as expected with multiple default / temporarily plugged devices. Interface might need a bit of a clean up though.

I think it was a buggy driver more than a Windows problem, as I tried selecting it as the default. It sometimes wouldn't show up when re-plugged in, as well. I'd even have to reboot sometimes to get it to show up as an option.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#23

Post by baldfat »

mmjaa wrote: post #5

I'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 y…

> JACK = less fuss

WHAT? That is crazy talk. JACK is the most complected audio setup I have ever worked with. I owned a Record Label and a small studio. If you have to setup JACK from scratch it can get crazy complicated. Once you get it working it is an AWESOME framework but I only would ever see people needing low latency to ever really use it.

JACK is 100% for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and it is for low latency. Pulse is for the rest. I have found that the legacy of a poor initial deployment has been a heavy chain around its neck just like KDE 4, RPM (for having an issue for a few months over 10 years ago) and now Systemd (Systemd had a fine performance roll-out but philosophy issues).

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#24

Post by Latty »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #20

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues. From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

It's mostly historical - Ubuntu shipped it as the default when it was still unstable. This lead to a lot of people learning about it and lots of 'try killing pulseaudio if something goes wrong' advice.

The reality now is it is very stable and has a huge number of powerful features. Personally I think it is great, and have no issues with it.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#25

Post by Latty »

drcross wrote: post #4

It 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.

This isn't a problem only for FOSS - windows starts dumping my audio down my monitors whenever I change input on them, even if I specifically disable the device. I actually don't see any issues like that on arch with pulse.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#26

Post by Latty »

nolok wrote: post #13
SwellJoe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You had the wrong default selected in Windows mixer. Need to select it as default when plugged and whenever it gets replugged it retake its priority. Works as expected with multiple default / temporarily plugged devices. Interface might need a bit of a clean up though.

Doesn't work for me (not the person you are replying to) - every time I change input on my monitors Windows starts trying to use them for audio - doesn't matter what default I set, even disabling them.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#27

Post by Aardwolf »

Ugh, the annoying PulseAudio that sometimes makes your volume suddenly much louder or much softer when you want to change it by just one notch, just because it wants to try to be "smart" with different applications or whatever thing I don't care about it is that it tries to do, there should be 1 volume slider and it should work correctly period (and without lag - another thing PulseAudio introduced).

Oh how I miss the simplicity and elegance of before PulseAudio (and its evil twin "hi-let-me-put-your-text-logs-in-a-binary-format"-systemd) appeared in ArchLinux.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#28

Post by duozerk »

Latty wrote: post #24
kutkloon7 wrote: post #20

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues. From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

It's mostly historical - Ubuntu shipped it as the default when it was still unstable. This lead to a lot of people learning about it and lots of 'try killing pulseaudio if something goes wrong' advice. The reality now is it is very stable and has a huge number of powerful features. Personally I think it is great, and have no issues with it.

That is the reason indeed. For years Pulseaudio was a pain in the backside to use - not just on Ubuntu but on Debian as well. I still dislike it and think it's overengineered but today it works pretty well to be honest; as long as your setup isn't anything too exotic.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#29

Post by squarefoot »

SwellJoe wrote: post #7
dijit wrote: post #3

Pulseaudio 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…

Reaper for Linux is already there. 100% native,no WINE required, and works great. http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/REAPER_for_Linux

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#30

Post by mrob »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #20

I am quite surprised that PulseAudio has a bad reputation. I couldn't get ALSA working on Arch Linux, and simply installing PulseAudio resolved all my issues. From the sentiment here I get the feeling that it might stop working any moment.

I had the opposite experience with Debian Sid a few days ago. I'd been using ALSA for everything without problems, but I was getting annoyed with the forced animations in Evince so I installed Okular instead (which has no forced animations). This brought in a big collection of dependencies, including PulseAudio. MPV immediately stopped working, even after manually configuring it for PulseAudio output. But it turned out PulseAudio wasn't a mandatory dependency for Okular, so I uninstalled it and everything worked perfectly again.
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