121–130 of 181 posts
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How did you ensure one app wasn't much louder than the other ?
I'm trying to think of a software audio source that doesn't have its own volume control and I'm failing.
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I usually had sound cards with hardware mixing, but what was wrong with esd? It did software mixing and seemed to work. (And didn't require you to run the rest of enlightenment, despite the name)
Never mind that ESD and like is a leftover from the OSS days. Alsa has its own sofware mixer, dmix, that these days can be transparently inserted when the underlying hardware do not offer hardware mixing. I wonder of Linux's biggest problem these days is the amount of "herd knowledge" that is floating around that is obsolete to say the least, yet is being used to justify some dev's latest weekend glory project.
I never had many problems with OSS either. :) I'm bringing up esd because I was misrembering that when pulseaudio came on the scene, it seemed to be already existing, not screwing up too badly, and addressing the commonly held up use case of software mixing.
After reading notalaser's fine summary [1], I'm realizing I've lumped 'ALSA broke everything that I already had working (but did eventually work, and support newer hardware)' and 'PulseAudio broke everything that I already had working' together in time in my mind, when really things were many years apart. It seems that by the time PulseAudio came out / was widely pushed, ALSA had already subsumed esd (unless you were using the network audio features), so the most often reported 'great thing' doesn't sound like something people wouldn't have had.
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 o…
PulseAudio posts are always filled with naysayers; the vast vast vast majority of users (like systemd in this regard) have no idea it's even running and just get on with whatever they're doing. I've primarily run Linux over the last fifteen or so years and barely had an issue that's directly PA's fault. I remember the bad old days where a playlist would finish and then GAIM's notification sound would bleat fifteen ti…
I too used Linux at that time and I remember that problem. The workaround in those days was to use esound. IIRC it also disappeared by the switch to alsa.
FreeBSD also doesn't have this problem, and it's still using the OSS api. Let's not confuse API with implimentation.
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Honestly, I guess its because I chose my hardware wisely - i.e. I use only very well-supported hardware components (in my case, Presonus/BridgeCo.), where high-capacity, low-latency audio was sort of implemented on Linux first and then ported to the other platforms .. so I'm looking at a current Firewire- based rig of 2 19" racks, full of gear, summing up to 40+ channels of audio over a single cable to the main DAW c…
> Honestly, I guess its because I chose my hardware wisely In that case, you can also chose hardware that works well with PA, so I don't see JACKs benefit there. Also, I don't think they're equivalent in functionality.
However, its moot - this is not consumer audio. Its more, "studio production audio"...
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I was entirely happy with alsa and still don't know of any use-case I have that's better served by the more fragile, more resource-hungry PulseAudio. I assume it's useful to someone.
Spoken confidently like someone that never tried to play sound in two applications at once.
This has worked well in ALSA for years now. Now, ALSA won't let you set the volume of each application separately, but most applications have their own volume control for that anyway.
And you'll never have to deal with the application's volume Pulse's volume for that source disagreeing, and scratching your head as to why even though you set the volume to max, it isn't getting very loud. To be fair, maybe this has been entirely solved; the last time I used Pulse was ~5 years ago[0], so I might be a bit out of date. But not more out-of-date than the claim that ALSA can't play sound in two applications at once!
[0]: I don't have anything against Pulse, I just don't see the point in installing it. What does adding it to my stack get me?
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This has worked reliably in ALSA before it has worked reliably in PulseAudio (and, in fact, way before PulseAudio received any meaningful adoption, when Fedora enrolled everyone in PA's beta testing).
Well, maybe in the later days, but there was a long time when it didn't work well at all. I remember having to mess with the ALSA configuration to make it work. And then you also had apps which only supported OSS and getting them to work together with ALSA was an additional pain.
Does anybody know if there's a similar such document for ALSA similarly written by someone who isn't an ALSA insider?
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 la…