[LAU] PulseAudio and Alsa

[Stephen Doonan]

Juhana Sadeharju wrote:

> What is ESD in Preferences/Sound?


A few non-expert, ordinary-user comments--

ESD is the "Enlightened Sound Daemon," I'm guessing Gnome's equivalent 
of KDE's aRts sound server. I personally don't like these 
desktop-environment sound servers so I turn them off using the 
preferences and system control-panel tools of Gnome or KDE and rely on 
ALSA and JACK instead.

But regarding ESD, when PulseAudio is installed it installs an "ESD 
replacement" script that activates PulseAudio instead of ESD when ESD 
would normally be activated. So the "Enable software sound mixing (ESD)" 
checkbox in Sound Preferences in Gnome really probably turns PulseAudio 
on instead of ESD.

So now for me there are 3 things to turn off regarding sound: aRts, ESD 
and PulseAudio.

PulseAudio tries I guess to be a comprehensive solution to audio that 
would replace aRts and ESD at some point. But to me, at this point in 
time, it seems to create more problems than solutions.

-Steve