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PulseAudio under the hood

gavv.github.io

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Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#91

Post by zeveb »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #77
bandrami wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or wise, and you take control of your own attention. Multiplexing can be handy if you like gaming, and having music from another application at the same time. Also sometimes it's useful to have a reference manual in one side of the screen and your text editor in the other, or a PDF viewer on one side and a LaTeX editor in the other.

I'm with you regarding the value of multiplexing. I don't use it much, but it was really annoying back in the day when one program would block another program's sound.

> Also sometimes it's useful to have a reference manual in one side of the screen and your text editor in the other, or a PDF viewer on one side and a LaTeX editor in the other.

True. An emacs which supported the framebuffer could do this (but GNU emacs currently only supports vt100, X, macOS & Windows, IIRC).

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#92

Post by hamax »

zeveb wrote: post #88
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?

I don't: wireless headphones seem strictly worse in every way than wired. They require batteries and charging; they introduce lag; they are expensive; they are easier to lose; they don't have a convenient cable to hang on to. I am completely and totally flabbergasted by their popularity. It's as though millions of people were turning their noses up at fine, free homemade French food and paying for McDonald's instead.

> 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.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#93

Post by hashkb »

majewsky wrote: post #41
dom0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with PA is that (it appears like) there aren't really any simple errors. For most software, you have a bunch of common problems that you can find on Stackoverflow easily with a reliable solution. Pulse, on the other hand, while working fine on 99% of systems, usually fails catastrophically in creative ways on the remaining 1% and it's really hard to even understand what the problem is. (And of course, the…

Two nines isn't very many nines. I've had problems with PA 100% of the time. Must be me, right? The only PA solution I know is purging it from my system.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#94

Post by sigjuice »

justinsaccount wrote: post #51
dom0 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Restarting PA does not help; have to reboot Then PA is not the problem, your sound card/drivers is.

How does one go about debugging something like this to pinpoint the root cause? I am just curious. I know nothing about PA (or even sound). Thanks!

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#95

Post by msla »

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…

For me, personally, the bad old days before PA was OSS, when an application could squat on the audio hardware and absolutely disallow any other software from playing any sounds at all on the system until it was stopped or forcibly killed. And good luck finding which piece of software was claiming absolute ownership of your sound card.

PA gives me the ability to have multiple pieces of software making noise at once, a software mixer with per-application and per-sound-hardware volume control which is completely divorced from those applications (so if I say MUTE, it is damn well MUTED), and the ability to choose where the sound is being output to. I cannot imagine anything doing better on the hardware I have.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#96

Post by ibotty »

toast0 wrote: post #67
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…

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)

Oh, it did not work good for many use cases, and even in the supported use cases it had pretty severe bugs. PA is also way more power efficient.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#97

Post by zeveb »

hamax wrote: post #92
zeveb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't: wireless headphones seem strictly worse in every way than wired. They require batteries and charging; they introduce lag; they are expensive; they are easier to lose; they don't have a convenient cable to hang on to. I am completely and totally flabbergasted by their popularity. It's as though millions of people were turning their noses up at fine, free homemade French food and paying for McDonald's instead.

> 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.

As a matter of fact, my desktop & my laptop are both wired, and I hate how flaky WiFi is on my phone & tablet. Just moving to different rooms in my (small house) does horrible things to my network connexion speed — but Ethernet keeps on chugging along.

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#98

Post by madez »

madez wrote: post #21

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.…

I'd like to add that the patch was rejected because the maintainer had a use-case in mind, deemed the feature not a good solution, and therefore rejected the patch.

I would comment directly on the site, but because the certificate is invalid, I cannot register an account.

I don't like the attitude to reject a patch just because one can't come up with a use-case. Obviously there is a use-case, else the patch wouldn't have been developed.

Also, the feature would be hidden in a configuration file that is meant for advanced configuration anyways.

On top of that, I have a AV-receiver that does support all of this bass management. For every channel I can configure individual crossover frequencies, and I can but don't need to use a subwoofer. Why doesn't PulseAudio give me these freedoms?

Why would a free software developer deny others easy ways, or any ways at all, to configure their system? This is equivalent to the walled-garden approach of many closed systems. Why does this occur in free software?

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#99

Post by throwaway2048 »

hashkb wrote: post #93
majewsky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with PA is that (it appears like) there aren't really any simple errors. For most software, you have a bunch of common problems that you can find on Stackoverflow easily with a reliable solution. Pulse, on the other hand, while working fine on 99% of systems, usually fails catastrophically in creative ways on the remaining 1% and it's really hard to even understand what the problem is. (And of course, the…

Two nines isn't very many nines. I've had problems with PA 100% of the time. Must be me, right? The only PA solution I know is purging it from my system.

what people mean when they say the vast majority of people dont have problems is "I don't care about your objectively broken experience"

Re: PulseAudio under the hood

#100

Post by throwaway2048 »

clouddrover wrote: post #50
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…

> but I'll be darned if I'm going to ever try to use it again You probably won't have to. I think the long term plan is for Pipewire to replace PulseAudio (and be an alternative to JACK). Pipewire also does video. The initial release of Pipewire is video only with audio support to come: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/09/19/launching-pipewire... http://pipewire.org/ https://github.com/PipeWire/pipewire

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.

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