Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PulseAudio under the hood

gavv.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 181 posts

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#131

Post by moonbug22 »

jerf wrote: post #74
c0l0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PulseAudio (PA) is modular, and you can load new modules implementing new functionality at runtime via `pacmd` (and presumably other clients/config tools). One of these modules that come with any standard distribution of recent-ish PA can use avahi/zeroconf (probably in part because avahi was Lennart P.'s previous focus of attention, before he started work on PA) to advertise PA sinks on the network. As a consequence…

In addition to the upvote already granted, I wanted to publicly thank you for trying to answer my question, because I love it when other people are polite this way. Thank you.

So, basically impossible for normal people.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#132

Post by twiddo »

onli wrote: post #53
bryananderson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should install apulse and run that with Firefox! Works like a charm.

You can also compile FF with ALSA enabled. Gentoo has a useflag for that.

I thought they had plans to deprecate the build flag in a later version, but can't find verification.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#133

Post by digi_owl »

mmjaa wrote: post #107
throwaway2048 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cant wait for another 10 years of broken linux audio. Why not fix what we have rather than yet another rewrite with all its attendant exciting bugs.

For 15 years, I've had a totally stable, rock-solid, perfect Audio environment on Linux. My main DAW is Linux-based, and completely stable. Best latency of any platform, to boot. So, just as a counterpoint, I'm guessing you're a Pulseaudio user ..

Nah, more a general observation of the CADT that is so painfully prevalent in Linux userspace...

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#134

Post by ShabbosGoy »

petepete wrote: post #16

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…

PA still randomly dies on my Thinkpad T420 running Ubuntu 17.04. I have to manually restart it several times in a day, and now I am really thinking of switching to a systemd/pulseaudio/RedHat influence free distro.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#135

Post by digi_owl »

bandrami wrote: post #111
hamax wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem strictly worse in every way than wired. The same as wifi, right? Strictly worse in every way. Except for the not needing wires way.

Wifi has encryption. Bluetooth means I'm broadcasting my audio stream to anybody who feels like snooping on me.

Not quite.

Bluetooth was originally encrypted, but gained the option of non-encrypted channels with version 1.1.

On top of that Bluetooth use frequency hopping.

Until recently there was no real hardware for scanning/sniffing Bluetooth traffic, at least not anything easily available compared to a wifi card in promiscuous mode.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#136

Post by snaky »

dom0 wrote: post #37
petepete wrote: post #16

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…

Firefox stopped supporting ALSA, so I had to install PA. PA gives me: a noise chirp when the PA daemon starts, which is probably some uninitialized garbage buffer. Sometimes (I don't know what triggers it, seems to be random, and no, it's not the auto-suspend module which is on by default but seems to cause a similar bug for many people) audio starts to lag by .3-.5 seconds. Restarting PA does not help; have to reboo…

> Firefox stopped supporting ALSA, so I had to install PA

PulseAudio emulation for ALSA https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#137

Post by digi_owl »

loeg wrote: post #120
simias wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this argument in this thread and quite frankly I'm dumbfounded. Last time I've had this issue was more than a decade ago on FreeBSD and it was solved by tweaking my OSS config to enable multiple channels. I've never, ever had this issue with Alsa. And I'm not a fan of Alsa either, PA just managed to be even more opaque and less reliable in my experience. Now, it's just anecdotic evidence of course but b…

FreeBSD's OSS is not ALSA. ALSA refused to do mixing in software for some time. Maybe it still doesn't do it, I don't know. So if you had a hardware sound card that would do mixing, you could play multiple channels with ALSA, but if you didn't, you were SOL.

Alsa has had dmix for quite some time. The thing was that until something like a decade ago it had to be manually enabled via a .asoundrc edit. These days Alsa will enable it automatically on any device known to not have a hardware mixer.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#138

Post by digi_owl »

LukeShu wrote: post #127
lathiat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken confidently like someone that never tried to play sound in two applications at once.

Also 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…

Another "lovely" thing about PA is that will allow the loudest of the "apps" (groan) to ramp up the master control (do not recall the "feature" name right now).

Do wonder how much future hearing loss it has created by sudden spikes in volume...

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#139

Post by digi_owl »

twiddo wrote: post #132
onli wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also compile FF with ALSA enabled. Gentoo has a useflag for that.

I thought they had plans to deprecate the build flag in a later version, but can't find verification.

It will in any case not get any maintenance, so expect things to break with no recourse as new versions are released.

This similar to how on paper Firefox can still be compiled with GTK2, but it is not supported.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#140

Post by digi_owl »

bandrami wrote: post #66

Sigh. Once upon a time, sound cards were files in the /dev tree. To play sound, you wrote pcm data to the file representing a sink. To record, you read pcm data from a file representing a source. Things were better then. I'm sure there are people with use cases that have required the four (and counting!) solutions crufted on since then, but I've never been one of them, and it irks me that the interfaces get more and…

A massive sad part of all this is that so much of what is going on in Linux DE land right now seems to be driven by a pipe dream called multiseat. Or effectively using software to turn a Linux desktop install into a desktop mainframe.

This by attaching a bunch of peripherals and use software to assign them to groups that effectively form the equivalent of a graphical terminal.

All this supposedly in the hopes of introducing affordable computing to schools in the developing world. But said schools have already tested and discarded this idea, so why the DEs keep pushing it is a mystery.

Post reply on HN