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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RE[3]: Pulseaudio rocks
by segedunum on Fri 9th Oct 2009 01:02
in reply to "RE[2]: Pulseaudio rocks"
Member since:2005-07-06
And that doesn't mean it is not the right solution for linux either.
Which is what I said. :-)
Let's also pretend that all the happy Fedora/Ubuntu/etc users of Pulseaudio that have no problems with audio in their system don't exist.
Unfortunately that won't make the real problems that do exist go away. Note that Lennart still feels the need to say this:
"It's pretty obvious that the complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio you can hear in some forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people"
That's one of the most arrogant piles of crap I've read regarding open source software, and that's going some.
Let's suppose that all the distro guys are stupid and are choosing Pulseaudio because they don't know what they're doing.
It's a totally flawed argument to say "Oh, they're packaging it so you must be wrong". Linux distributors have proved that they'll package anything up and throw it in without a thought for what's going in there.
Let's also suppose that users won't miss all the features that Pulseaudio has
The only two features even Lennart has come up with is per application volume control and 'glitch-free' audio, which I find hilarious. Quite frankly, that hasn't been worth creating yet another audio layer for and it hasn't been worth breaking existing applications.
...and let's just throw random FUD and say that those problems arise from the way Pulseaudio is designed without explaining why 
For starters, PulseAudio has to work with existing applications and it implements a completely inadequate and inferior ALSA emulation layer that still doesn't work with all applications, so yer, it breaks things. Great. Advice is still to write for the PulseAudio safe subset of ALSA. I haven't seen anything that changes that and I still don't know if libsydney is anything other than vapourware. If you don't know why this is likely to encounter some serious problems -
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Pulseaudio-diagr...
- you're not much of a software developer.
So yer, let's talk about it. ;-)
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Member since:
2005-07-08
That doesn't mean that it is right for everyone else.
And that doesn't mean it is not the right solution for linux either. In fact, linux developers seem to like putting that kind of things in userspace. Personally I trust more audio developers and distro packagers than a bunch of users who happen to hate ALSA and Pulseaudio.
Dream on. Let's just pretend the bug reports and compatibility issues don't exist.
Let's also pretend that all the happy Fedora/Ubuntu/etc users of Pulseaudio that have no problems with audio in their system don't exist. Let's suppose that all the distro guys are stupid and are choosing Pulseaudio because they don't know what they're doing. Let's also suppose that users won't miss all the features that Pulseaudio has and they would lose if it was removed. Let's also pretend that the bugs reported are unfixable, and let's just throw random FUD and say that those problems arise from the way Pulseaudio is designed without explaining why
Edited 2009-10-08 22:57 UTC