PulseAudio in Fedora 8 [LWN.net]

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:58 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)
Parent article: PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Yea, pulseaudio sounds really good... on paper.

In a few years it might live up to the hype and be worth enabling.... by which time the next
new shiny 'break every audio app' hot must have thing will attract the ferrets at RH and we do
it all over again.  We have suffered through OSS, ESD, ARTSd, ALSA and now Pulse has every
audio app crashing, requiring upgrades, etc.  Bah.

We need to start a pool whether PulseAudio will reach 'most users leave it enabled' status
before SELinux.

Really, it is a nice idea to have hotplugged USB speakers and stuff but until xine and mplayer
can actually playback video without crashing is it too much to ask to keep the bleeding edge
in rawhide one more major version?  And no audio without a X session running?  Showstopper as
far as I'm concerned.

I'm just thankful they haven't found JACK yet.  ;)

(Log in to post comments)

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 21:09 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

I think that your complaints amount to a lot of FUD.  I use PA in Debian and have not had to
modify any apps, part of its strength is its backward compatibility.   As for not having an
Xsession, I think you misunderstand how it can be used, I run it without an Xsession all the
time.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:04 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Your experience does not match mine. I run the pulse audio server on a headless Via C3 box, along with MPD. On my desktop, sending audio to the server, I've run mplayer (via padsp), xine, quodlibet, audacious, and various controls. I've not seen any crashes, and everything Just Works, unlike every previous sound system I've tried. It's also pretty well docuemented, unlike any other sound system I've seen. Possibly this is related?

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 13:01 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I saw crashes... but that was with PolypAudio 0.5, which may as well be prehistory as far as
we're concerned now.

My only remaining concern with PulseAudio 0.9.6 was the CPU chewing because of its `play
silence when nothing is being played' semantics, and that is fixed in 0.9.7.

Nathan was correct above: PulseAudio does indeed appear to be able to imitate *every* sound
server you could possibly imagine, and connect to most of them downstream as well.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 22:06 UTC (Wed) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

There's an ALSA plugin that lets you route ALSA signals through it, so your applications don't
have to be changed at all. Works much more smoothly than ALSA dmix, so I'm definitely leaving
it turned on.

The only snag is that VideoLAN Client is not fully compatible with it (need to set the audio
device to the proper ALSA one manually). Last.fm's client is still hogging the ALSA device,
but that's a problem even with dmix.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 2, 2007 11:07 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

Videolan has an ESD plugin which PA supports, so I just use that now.