[LAU] pulseaudio issues [was Re: jackdbus issues: a workaround ? (Was: more jack/qjackctl madness)]

alex stone compose59 at gmail.com
Tue May 19 09:49:06 EDT 2009


This is, i believe, at the heart of the problem.

As a user looking in from the outside, it appears odd that the pulse
team didn't jump onboard with jack, and bring all that enthusiasm and
expertise to further enhancing jack to be the 'one solution'.
Was pulse built to truly provide a 1 stop solution, or an attempt to
sideline jack in favour of a domestic entertainment model?

Because it's clear from the structure of pulse with it's enforced
latency, and the online documentation, that professional users, and
those who want a realtime audio framework are going to be out of luck,
and well.."too bad".

Trying not to sound cynical here, but i've seen all this before in the
windows and mac worlds, where the generic game playing majority ruled
supreme, over those of us who, for example, were using 250 tracks in
daws, not 25. And 80 midi ports, instead of 8.
We had to jump through many hoops, most of which tripped us up,
because commercial devs didn't give a shit about increasing midi port
numbers, or developing multi app audio options, or anything remotely
associated with alternate uses for the software.

I'll be frank, i think the enforced pulse option is a selfish, and
self interested one, with little or no consideration for a sizable
majority of users, and is diamatrically opposite to the spirit of
opensource, and the choice it used to give the user.

No doubt i'll get flamed for this, but after two years of linux, and
countless hours put into testing apps, steep learning curves, and
encouraging and helping new users, i'm starting to wonder if it was
worth it, when the very tools i migrated for, are so easily dismissed
in favour of devs so eagerly chasing the....flash plugin crowd.

Frankly, that sucks.

I think Patrick's right in the options he presented. And from what
i've seen and read over the last 2 years, i'm inclined to think there
was a concerted effort to supplant jack in favour of a domestic option
in the pursuit of 'generic' accolades.

As for pulse handling tasks that jack can't, i'm yet to see evidence
of this. If the same...'tasks' had been added to Jack by the same
pulse devs, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

A linux dev recently remarked to me that the politics of linux was a
hindrance to progress.
I'm beginning to understand why he said it.

Alex.

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Patrick Shirkey
<pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> Funny thing is that I'm looking at the docs for pulse audio and no where
> so far is there a mention of jack.
>
> In the faq,  "perfect setup", "first steps"...  It would appear that
> jack support for PA is/was an after thought. One could even get the
> impression that the people who wrote the pulse audio documentation
> believe that jack is redundant.
> Now, if this is not a strategically motivated ommission to keep people
> employed working on pulse audio then I have to wonder what is the
> reasoning behind pulse audio being presented as the all in one solution
> for audio on Linux when jack is clearly and undeniably the sound server
> of choice for professional audio.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Patrick Shirkey
> Boost Hardware Ltd
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
>



-- 
Parchment Studios (It started as a joke...)



More information about the Linux-audio-user mailing list