PulseAudio in Fedora 8 [LWN.net]

The Fedora project, claiming to have the first distribution to use PulseAudio by default, has posted an interview with Lennart Poettering. "A lot of things have changed. For example, you can now change the volume of every playback stream seperately. Then, we have better hotplug support: Just plug in your USB speaker and it will appear in your mixer... You can move streams during playback between output devices. With a single click in our 'paprefs' tool you can aggregate all local audio devices into a virtual one, which distributes audio to all outputs, and deals with the small frequency deviations in the sound card's quartzes -- and that code even deals with hotplugging/unplugging."

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Fedora / Debian tossup?

Posted Oct 31, 2007 18:52 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (2 responses)

This article is about adding pulseaudio support to Fedora right?  But at the bottom of the
interview he says: "Very quickly I moved to Debian, though, and used it for almost 8 years,
and never used anything else again."

Do people have that much time that they can be primarily Debian users while being Fedora
developers, wow? :)  It's good to see cross distro users/development.

Fedora / Debian tossup?

Posted Oct 31, 2007 18:55 UTC (Wed) by alexl (guest, #19068) [Link]

Lennart works for redhat now

Fedora / Debian tossup?

Posted Oct 31, 2007 20:56 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I wonder when version 0.9.7 will find its way into Debian unstable.  What I have read suggests
it is substantially more mature than the 0.9.6 found there now.

The mass of backward-compatibility hacks the pulseaudio developers have provided, to make it
easy to switch, is nothing short of astounding.  It's as if Henry Ford delivered not just a
car, but also a hay-to-gasoline cooker, a road paver, traffic lights, and an autopilot.  I've
successfully avoided esound, jack, nas, etc., but I'm almost looking forward to pulseaudio.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:33 UTC (Wed) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]

It's Poettering btw. With "oe", like in "Goethe".

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:56 UTC (Wed) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (2 responses)

The guy who develops PulseAudio is also the Avahi developer?  That person is generously
endowed with the power of JFW.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 21:07 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

JFW? Jet Fired Way-coolness?

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 3, 2007 3:54 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

Just F@&#ing Works?

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Oct 31, 2007 19:58 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (5 responses)

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.  ;)

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] (1 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 3:20 UTC (Thu) by charris (guest, #13263) [Link]

I've run into one PA bug so far: an incompatibility with SDL_mixer that caused Battle of
Wesnoth to hang. I filed a bug report and by that evening there was a workaround. No doubt
there will be other problems, but hey, new stuff is what Fedora is all about.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 6:01 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

This thing kicks ass for dealing with multiple computers, also.

For example a long time I had a desktop and a laptop. I'd carry around the laptop and use the
Desktop at home.

Avahi + PulseAudio + Synergy2 + SSH-Agent + X-over-ssh made using both machines simultaniously
pretty much seamless. Network'd X worked, one app would run fine on the other (and with Aiglx
you get OpenGL acceleration, also!), one set of speakers for both computers, one keyboard, one
mouse, multiple displays.

The only issues was with SDL-based sound not working and some performance issues with mplayer.
Something like that.

It's better then anything else that has come so far.

I think that with pulse-audio it may provide the level of abstraction that is needed to make
desktop audio 'just work'.

If we can get a 'quirks' website for sound cards just like
http://people.freedesktop.org/~hughsient/quirk/ for suspend/keys/backlight were people can get
alsa configurations for surround sound, line in recording and such things that can be then put
into a database for Pulseaudio/HAL/whatever to use then we can get a good handle on the whole
sound card issue.

Right now for Linux desktop when a person figures out a nice configuration for their sound
card they'll post it to a personal blog or wiki which then users with similar cards would have
to google for in order to find. Then they would have to go through the steps to manually
re-create the working configurations. So it would be nice to be able to just provide these
configurations through (easily editable and self-documented) XML files or something that can
be included by distros.

I kinda like this approach (of having pulseaudio for desktop) because then for the pro-audio
folks can still have their low-latency, low-level interfaces into Alsa and the media/pcm
routing capabilities of Jack, while for Desktop Linux you can still have the 'just works'
stuff.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 12:22 UTC (Thu) by mmarkov (guest, #4978) [Link] (2 responses)

An off-topic question: speaking of audio mixers and Fedora, does anyone know how to save the
values set with alsamixer in Fedora 7?

I lose those settings with every reboot and as a consequence, if I want to use the microphone
after a reboot, I have to run alsamixer again.  Not a big deal but very annoying.  A certain
field of alsamixer resets itself to zero after a reboot.  I tried "aslactl store" to save the
mixer settings but no luck.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 1, 2007 21:15 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It would be the alsactl command.

Somewere in the depths of the Fedora init scripts a 'alsactl restore' should be ran when you
boot up and a 'alsactl save' should be ran when you shutdown.

See the man file for details.

PulseAudio in Fedora 8

Posted Nov 2, 2007 7:57 UTC (Fri) by tomas2 (guest, #37038) [Link]

"I lose those settings with every reboot and as a consequence,
if I want to use the microphone after a reboot, I have to run
alsamixer again."

One thing that might be causing this, and is soo obvious that some
people may miss it :) is that If you use kde, then be sure to uncheck
the setting "restore volume levels at startup" or something like
that (I'm going from memory here and my memory isn't too good :))
in kmix. Otherwise the sound levels are changed to what kmix thinks
they should be when you log in to kde.

Or then use kmix and set the sound levels there, but then be aware
that the sound levels you set in alsamixer are going to change when
you log into kde. This way doesn't work too well in a multi user
environment with many X servers running at the same time and many
users logged/logging in, as kmix changes the volume level with every
new user logging in, so I alwasys use the first variant and uncheck
the "restore" setting in kmix for every user.

Guess there is something similar in gnome also, but I haven't checked.


Tomas