Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 16, 2017 14:25 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (guest, #20463)
Parent article: Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

How critical is pulseaudio exactly? I do have it running sometimes, but I can do most I need just with alsa.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 16, 2017 15:10 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

PulseAudio is pretty critical if you want stuff like an intermittently connected Bluetooth headset, webcam microphone, or TV set with HDMI audio to work out of the box. It can manage these conveniently and do things like hand off audio streams from one of those devices to another in mid-play.

Many people think that that sort of thing ought to work on a desktop system, but if your audio setup is quite static and you are never confronted with the issue in the first place, you can probably get away without PulseAudio.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 19, 2017 13:42 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

Our home system is multi-user. We'll typically have three or four people logged in on vt7, vt8 etc. And as soon as the currently active user does something with sound it (often, not always) kills sound from other sessions. Not (always) welcome behaviour.

My system doesn't have PulseAudio - I gather that would give us far more control over what happens.

Cheers,
Wol

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 19, 2017 15:12 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I believe pulseaudio closes the sound device when the session in which it is being run goes inactive (on VT switch). So only the currently active session is able to play sound.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 19, 2017 15:41 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

Most distros don't let multiple users play sound at the same time. Their vision of multiple user is the "Switch User" ability, and they try to set it up so sound, input and GPU devices change ownership to the currently active user.

With some development effort you could fix that. PulseAudio for example, has a system daemon mode. Disable the per-user pulse daemon, use the system level one, fix the socket access permissions, etc, and you could play audio from all users at once.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 24, 2017 19:25 UTC (Tue) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (1 responses)

The multi-user system setup described is certainly something PulseAudio promised to provide, but I quickly got seriously disillusioned when I actually tried to get it working in real life. Perhaps it was just that I was too early an adopter (this was a few years ago now) but the lack of factually accurate, readable documentation on PulseAudio was utterly atrocious; none of it made any sense and much of it was conflicting. (The alternative at the time, ESD, had some fairly serious drawbacks and couldn't compete on features but at least it was possible for normal people to configure and get working.)

In the end I wiped every vestige of PA from my system; at least single-user sound worked much more efficiently and I was happy to be rid of another layer of useless bloat.

By way of comparison, JACK was comparatively simple to get working and did exactly what it promised.

Maintainers for desktop "critical infrastructure"

Posted Jan 25, 2017 9:00 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

By way of comparison, JACK was comparatively simple to get working and did exactly what it promised.

Yes, but JACK and PulseAudio cater to completely different use cases, and therefore comparing the two is essentially comparing a fairly simple apple to a pretty complicated orange. The oft-reviled Lennart Poettering explains this in more detail.