[LAD] [ANNOUNCE] Safe real-time on the desktop by default; Desktop/audio RT developers, read this!

[Chris Cannam]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Ivica Ico Bukvic<ico at vt.edu> wrote:
>> PA is one of the biggest screwups ever, but red hat can't see it.
>
> I don't think PA is a bad thing.

PulseAudio works well for me, and I can't believe I'm the only one.  I
have far more confidence in being able to get sound straight away out
of any random application, in-browser video, etc., than I ever had
before it turned up.  (Though I had some difficulties with it at
first, partly because Ubuntu started out -- in 8.04 I think? -- by
shipping PulseAudio with a version of Flash that didn't work with it,
and were slow to bundle the most useful control tool.)

It's reasonable that any user who knows exactly what they want and how
to get it is going to find it annoying to be presented with a sound
server that doesn't know as much as they do.  But most users aren't
like that.  I'm not like that myself, a lot of the time.  And it's
easy enough to do away with PulseAudio when you don't need it.

The problem it addresses may be of little interest on this list, but
it is real, and it's extremely difficult to manage when you have
essentially no power to determine what audio API any given application
will use.


Chris