Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 8th Oct 2009 19:09 UTC, submitted by MadMAtt
Lennart Poettering, creator of open source sound server PulseAudio, was recently interviewed at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. In this Q&A he details the latest PulseAudio developments and addresses some of PA's critics. Thanks to PulseAudio, the Linux audio experience is becoming more context-aware. For example, if a video is running in one application the system should now automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2008-05-26
Running PulseAudio on Ubuntu, it's working just fine here, but I cannot help but wonder what the point of it is.
So support for 2 or more sound cards is nice(TM), but I can't imagine anything other than the vast majority of users never having any use for that.
So support for 2 or more sound cards is nice(TM), but I can't imagine anything other than the vast majority of users never having any use for that.
You're not thinking four-dimensionally! I have three sound input devices - my sound card, my USB headset and my webcam. It's not "support for 2 or more sound cards", it's "support for all the audio input devices people have plugged in these days".
And as for per-process volume control? Yeah, nice... running pavucontrol right now causes the pulseaudio process to consume 25%+ CPU on this laptop. Now this wouldn't be so bad (actually... wait... yes it is!) but pulseaudio has a built in counter that checks how much CPU it uses and if it goes over a certain limit, it shuts down. And what does that mean? Well of course your sound goes *poof*.
If Pulseaudio is using 25% of your CPU time, then it's a bug. It doesn't do that here. The per-process volume control is fantastic when you're playing DVDs/BDs and keeping an instant messenger open in the background.
I also have to add +1 to the person who said "All the people complaining about Pulseaudio are neglecting to mention the problems that were present before with ALSA and OSS". Since Ubuntu 8.10's Pulseaudio and installing padevchooser, I haven't had any problems with sound. That's got to be saying something.
Member since:2005-07-06
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2009-09-07
Running PulseAudio on Ubuntu, it's working just fine here, but I cannot help but wonder what the point of it is.
So support for 2 or more sound cards is nice(TM), but I can't imagine anything other than the vast majority of users never having any use for that.
And as for per-process volume control? Yeah, nice... running pavucontrol right now causes the pulseaudio process to consume 25%+ CPU on this laptop. Now this wouldn't be so bad (actually... wait... yes it is!) but pulseaudio has a built in counter that checks how much CPU it uses and if it goes over a certain limit, it shuts down. And what does that mean? Well of course your sound goes *poof*.
Again, WHAT! IS! THE! POINT?! If you can't use the feature without it disabling all sound then what good is it?! And here is the best part -- it's not a bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456623 - in other words don't ever expect this crap to be fixed if redhat has any say in it. At least Ubuntu hasn't closed their bug report -- yet. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/373450