[LAU] Pulseaudio, Dave's Ubuntu review....

[Ken Restivo]

On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 12:18:37PM -0400, Rob wrote:
> >All Ubuntu users (GNome) seems to do all kind of hacks to remove or
> >disable pulseaudio. Also Dave names it as a solution to work with
> >pulseaudio on Ubuntu Studio.
> >AFAIK you can solve this whole thing by:
> >$ pasuspender qjackctl
> 
> Fair enough, but by the time I go "pasuspender firefox" and "pasuspender 
> virtualbox" and pasuspender all the other programs I use that cause 
> Pulseaudio to use 100% of my CPU and stutter madly while causing no similar 
> problems using plain Alsa (or JACK, when it's supported), I've accomplished 
> the same thing as "sudo mv /usr/bin/pulseaudio 
> /usr/bin/pulseaudio.disabled; sudo ln -s /bin/false /usr/bin/pulseaudio; 
> killall pulseaudio" which I only have to do once.

:-)

I did this with Evolution some time back. I got tired of it accidentally launching from Firefox all the time. For sound daemons, I just disable them from /etc/rcX.d by using the "update-rc.d" script. And I run a desktop WM (ion3) that doesn't try to impose any sound daemon on me.

> 
> >If I'm right, we should find new ways to prevent having all those myths
> 
> Pulseaudio performing poorly for many people is not a myth.  I look forward 
> to the day when PA provides solid playback performance, low latency and 
> automagically sends my audio to all my other machines.  In the meantime, 
> it's as useless as esd or artsd and much more of a hog.  There's no need 
> for me to report bugs because eliminating it is exactly as useful to me as 
> getting the bugs fixed.  I have Alsa's built-in mixing for multiplexing 

Exactly. I've been ritually disabling desktop sound daemons on any machine I install for 10 years now.

For pro audio work, JACK is great and essential, but other than that, sound daemons get the way much more than they help. Linux apps want to talk directly to the hardware. For multiple desktop apps using the sound card simultaneously, there's dmix, as you mention, already in ALSA. Problem solved.

> audio of mainstream apps, JACK as a necessary evil for real audio apps, and 
> for the once in 3 or 4 years that I want to share audio between machines, 
> icecast.  PA is a scratch in need of an itch.
> 

I think it's much more good than evil, but it sure is necessary. When I'm not doing audio work, I kill it, and also (on my EEE) turn cpufreq back on powersave.

-ken