PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus [LWN.net]

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 8, 2021 14:21 UTC (Mon) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
In reply to: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus by pizza
Parent article: PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

ALSA dmix is still there, it works fine. I've used it for years since I don't use pulseaudio because it's unpredictable and I don't feel like doing debug every time it fails.

Never had a problem with dmix.

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PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 9, 2021 16:39 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

People can say that about Pulseaudio too. Never had problems with it. Or not serious ones anyway. Yes, I have had it glitch and flip off USB headphones back to speakers or other things. But nothing seriously wrong.

Back when I ran Gentoo Linux I did run ALSA with dmix. And I did have problems sometimes. For example, if you nice some process which is acting as the dmix output to ALSA it gets under runs. If a process which is part of dmix gets hammered by OOM or a kill -9 signal things can get super messed up.

The best setup was on my home desktop running Gentoo because there I had a Soundblaster Audigy 2 card which managed a full 5.1 surround setup and I believe 16 independent input sources. The only real problem there was alsactl which had about 500 cryptically named visible controls.

PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus

Posted Mar 9, 2021 17:32 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah, I remember trying to find the right things to mute/unmute in ALSA's mixer even with a simple laptop setup. Many unfun times when you need to do it on a quick turn around time.