
Linux.FR has an
interview with Lennart Poettering of PulseAudio and systemd fame (among others). Regarding PulseAudio: "I can understand why people were upset, but quite frankly we didn't really have another option than to push it into the distributions when we did. While PulseAudio certainly wasn't bug-free when the distributions picked it up the majority of issues were actually not in PulseAudio itself but simply in the audio drivers. PulseAudio's timer-based scheduling requires correct timing information supplied by the audio driver, and back then the drivers weren't really providing that. And that not because the drivers were really broken, but more because the hardware was, and the drivers just lacked the right set of work-arounds, quirks and fixes to compensate for it."
Member since:
2005-07-06
I'd disagree, in this particular case. There hasn't really been any kind of API instability for audio on Linux. PA is built on ALSA, and ALSA's API hasn't changed in years and years.
The major problem with Linux audio is very simple and is called out by Lennart in the interview: there just aren't enough people working on it. As Lennart says, there's about three and a half people trying to do the entirety of all audio work on Linux, including improving PA and ALSA, fixing bugs, *and* supporting new sound hardware. That's not close to enough.