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:2009-04-22
No, what you need is a realtime kernel. Good news: The full set of -rt patches are about to be merged into Linus' mainline kernel.
With PulseAudio you can change output device on the fly while the application is playing sound. Start JACK and PulseAudio can be automatically reconfigured to use JACK as it's output device. When JACK is stopped it can go back to output to the soundcard directly again.
This way you can have the best of both worlds. Super low latency in your pro audio apps (talking to JACK directly) and all the features of PulseAudio for everything else.
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Member since:
2006-02-25
As i said in other posts, the problem is not userspace or kernel mixing of multiple applications. The problem is mixing low latency audio with regular latency apps audio, something that Windows and OSX are able to do with CoreAudio and ASIO, that even Linux with PulseAudio can't. For that you need to be able to mix both a low latency and regular latency streams in kernel, possibly doing some resampling, otherwise a lot of CPU is wasted. Windows and OSX still do this in kernel.