We reported earlier on a blog post entitled "Ubuntu Report Card (2009)" where the author detailed how they felt the Ubuntu experience had improved over the years. In a follow-up series of articles looking at the future, Tanner Helland has written 10 different broadly-scoped feature requests that [he] 'and many others would like to see by the time Ubuntu 10.10 rolls around'.
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Member since:2009-09-03
Member since:2009-04-08
Member since:2005-07-06
Pulseaudio for me has on a number of occasions introduced "clicking" and stuttering in the audio which is pretty clear to hear. Right now I'm running Ubuntu without Pulse and everything works fine (in which case, why do I need Pulse?) The downside is that removing Pulse breaks Update Manager and apt because of the ridiculous dependency on Pulse from ubuntu-desktop.
Member since:2005-07-06
"Pulseaudio for me has on a number of occasions introduced "clicking" and stuttering in the audio which is pretty clear to hear"
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_PulseAudio#Playback_problems...
Member since:2009-08-06
Member since:2009-02-19
I would agree completely. Especially since Pulse is the thing providing software sound mixing (unless dmix has suddenly started working properly and I just missed that bulletin). My understanding, gathered from battling with my sound system on various distroes over my short few years of Linux experience, is that Alsa offers exactly as many sound output channels as your sound hardware actually has -- and, surprise! most people's integrated sound systems will have one hardware sound channel, that every other operating system would multiplex to produce multiple virtual sound output channels in software. Alsa doesn't do that: it's left to userspace systems -- i.e. Pulse! -- to provide that functionality. So... without Pulse, only one application will be able to use the Alsa device to produce sound at any given time.
I understand that newer Alsa versions do include a software mixer plug-in, dmix, and that it's supposed to be enabled by default. Now, in theory, if your Alsa's new, you can just drop multiple sound streams on Alsa, and it will mix them in software and output them on your real sound hardware (like every other OS's sound system has always done). Except that, in so far as has been my experience, most Alsa-speaking applications don't understand dmix, and the Alsa installations that I've encountered don't actually have working/default-loaded dmix plugins. So... if dmix works well enough to make Pulse unnecessary, it's news to me.
Edit: shorter post:
The system should be doing the job Pulse does; the equivalent of Pulse is a system service for every other OS on Earth. Until Alsa starts properly providing for multichannel sound in software, something else is gonna have to do it, and presently, pulse does the best job.
Edited 2009-10-01 23:11 UTC
Member since:
2007-03-13
not sure what's the deal with people whining about pulseaudio. I never had any issues with it and I hear it makes working with more than one sound card a breeze. Sure it's young, but a good project.