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PulseAudio under the hood

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Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#171

Post by dvtv75 »

bandrami wrote: post #75
kbenson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't; I want exactly one sound source at a given time Really? So you want all app feedback to cease if you're playing music? No IM or new email notifications? That just seems like a pain to me.

I hate app feedback and notification sounds. I hate notifications in general; I prefer to poll for information I need on my schedule. This is also why I hate desktop environments and use a simple full screen window manager. One task at a time. Hell, lately I don't even bring up X every day if I don't need to. Tl;dr: I'm old.

There's nothing quite as jarring as having a pleasant piece of music turned up, only to have some off-key and out-of-time bell ding because an email arrived. Want to let me know there's a new email? Put a little envelope on the task bar so I can see it. Don't invade my music!

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#172

Post by bandrami »

gmueckl wrote: post #154
digi_owl wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intr…

Serious question: I remember claims that poorer countries basically switched to smartphones instead of PCs and phones are supposed surprisingly ubiquitous there. Can anybody confirm that? Seats never made much sense to me and if the smartphone story has any truth to it, then I do not see any valid use case for that idea these days.

It's certainly true in urban India (and becoming more true in rural India). And this has the added bonus of bringing people into the banking system because you can store, send, and withdraw cash from your mobile account (this started in sub-saharan Africa but is becoming more of a thing in rural India too).

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#173

Post by LukeShu »

loeg wrote: post #168
LukeShu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you ensure that one tab wasn't much louder than the other? In this case, it doesn't make much sense to treat the browser as a single application, but each site as one (does Chrome export each tab as a separate source to PA? IDK, I haven't checked). And, I can't think of a single thing that I actually want producing sound (and don't mind just muting) from my web browser that doesn't have its own volume contr…

In my use, zero or one tabs is producing sound at any one time, so the distinction doesn't really matter to me.

And in most people's use, zero or one applications is producing sound at any one time, so the distinction doesn't really matter to them.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#174

Post by StudentStuff »

ShabbosGoy wrote: post #134
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.

Try Debian on it, half the reason I switched away from Ubuntu years back was that it always seemed to have show stopping bugs like what you've experienced. I've yet to have PulseAudio crash on my T420, though sometimes it buffers audio when I walk too far from my bluetooth speaker.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#175

Post by majewsky »

jerf wrote: post #52
majewsky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. When Pulse works, it's really magical. Like when you go to the hackerspace, connect to the Wifi, and the room speakers appear in your mixer and Just Work.

So, this is an honest question, not an attempt to be cruel: How exactly do you get that to happen? Because my reaction when I read the linked article was that pulse sure does seem to have a lot of features that sound pretty useful, but after years and years of nominally having it on my system in charge of my audio hardware, I have, to be blunt, absolutely no clue how to use any of those features, except a bit about n…

> So, this is an honest question, not an attempt to be cruel: How exactly do you get that to happen?

The other answer is way better than mine, but I will add what I also said elsewhere in this thread: In 99% of cases, Pulse just works. In 1% of cases, it fails in catastrophic, bizarre and utterly undebuggable ways. I have the luck of being in the 99%.

I just installed and started Avahi and selected "Make network sound devices available locally" (or whatever the option is called) in paprefs.

That's for the client part. For the server part, see https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master... (that's for Arch Linux, package names etc. might differ between distributions).

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#176

Post by baldfat »

jskkk wrote: post #144
baldfat wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the long term plan is for Pipewire to replace PulseAudio No that's not it at all. It's a framework that will use Pulseaudio OR Jack. Jack is only for low latency needs AKA Professional audio production. "Pipewire is used to build a modular daemon that can be configured to: be a low-latency audio server with features like pulseaudio and/or jack. https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire/wiki

What about that quote makes it seem like it will use pulse audio or JACK rather than acting as a replacement for them?

Checked on their Freenode channel. They are looking at not total replacement but will replace certain features.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#177

Post by jononor »

bandrami wrote: post #108
adambyrtek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have difficulty believing that people actually use bluetooth for audio So you don't believe that somebody would like to be able to use wireless headphones?

Exactly. Why would you trade something that doesn't require power, has the most reliable, secure, and lossless transmission channel known, and is "configured" by plugging in hardware for something that requires power, has a less reliable transmission channel that can be easily snooped or forged, has to be configured in software? I literally don't understand why anyone would ever choose the latter.

Like a laptop or smartphone has over a stationary computer, wireless headsets have a freedom-of-movement benefit over wired.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#178

Post by Macha »

sitkack wrote: post #39
Latty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OSX remembers per device settings and reapplies them when the new device is visible. I haven't used windows seriously in 15 years. Linux has really bad UX most of the time. OSX is the best of the worst.

Does OS X even have an OS level volume mixer? Can I set my background music to be 20% of my video game without going into each of their inbuilt volume sliders? Can I move apps between audio devices? In a showdown between OS X, Windows and Pulse for audio setups as a consumer, OS X comes dead last and I use all 3 regularly.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#179

Post by Macha »

dsr_ wrote: post #14
sprash wrote: post #11

Loads of complexity. I don't see the value. Just give me files I can write data into and suddenly everything becomes very easy. Everybody knows how to write files. I know this discussion is getting really old but when Alsa was a step in the wrong direction, Pulse was the highspeed train in the wrong direction that followed, trying to "fix" it. This overengineered mess is the result of the tragedy allowing former Wind…

PulseAudio is the only audio system I have used that can stop recognizing output hardware (on the motherboard!) without a reboot. On the worst of its competitors, you can be assured that once you get it working, it continues to work at least until reboot, and usually until you change config or upgrade the wrong package.

Unplug a usb audio device, even unintentionally from a Windows PC and look at the havoc it can cause. Your media player is probably smart enough to handle it, your voip app is probably smart enough, your browser is maybe smart enough. Everything else though? Watch as it decides to play via HDMI to your speakerless monitor or crashes if that's not recognised as an audio device. Or crashes anyway. Or just never plays sound again until a reboot.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#180

Post by kutkloon7 »

makomk wrote: post #101
Latty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the problem is that the early releases were pretty bad - sometimes even requiring patches that were only published in the Fedora package to work correctly (like, they literally hadn't upstreamed by the developers at all at the time). PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else. They just released what I thin…

> PulseAudio also didn't do bugfix-only releases, you either backported or waited for the next major release and hoped it didn't break anything else.

Haha, that is ridiculous!

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