[LAU] perhaps why some of us have more trouble w/ pulseaudio than others (ICE1712/M-audio delta problem w/ pulseaudio)

Joel Roth joelz at pobox.com
Wed May 12 19:20:52 UTC 2010


On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:01:00AM +0800, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 09:14 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Philipp Überbacher
> > <hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> > 
> >  
> >         PA tries to do all of this at once, and at least on the
> >         desktop it fails
> >         often enough. Sure, many user complaints are old and the
> >         problems might
> >         be solved, but many users are fed up with it already and don't
> >         ever want
> >         to try it again. 
> > 
> > The users that I have seen who are fed up with are generally people
> > who are trying to get JACK and PA to work on the same system with only
> > a single audio interface. The impression that I have (and it may be
> > wrong) is that users who don't try to do this are reasonably happy
> > with PA to the extent that ALSA works correctly for their Intel HDA
> > chipset. They get features that people have wanted for a long, long
> > time (device sharing, per-app sound control, switching output based on
> > jack-sensing status, on-the-fly device switching and more) and most of
> > this stuff works really well. The headaches seem to come mostly from
> > the same place that a lot of JACK user complaints come from these
> > days: poor/incomplete/hard to use HDA driver support.
> 
> The other group of people who are fed up are those who had problems with
> the early PA-releases in various distros (Ubuntu mostly), solved them by
> removing PA, and have since them removed PA on every install/upgrade. Of
> course, this starts causing problems, which are then blamed on PA, even
> though the original issues which caused them to want to remove in the
> first place have been fixed.
> 
> Its amazing how single-minded Linux users can be over something like
> this. Isn't a big part of Linux choice, flexibility, and all that?

I think that goes back to one of the problems with PA: that
some distros are not giving users a choice _not_ to use PA.

Users would be more open to experimenting and less prone
to snap judgments if they could have an easy way to
enable/disable pulseaudio, or perhaps some kind of
pass-through mode.

That would also help to recognize if problems are coming
from PA or from somewhere in the ALSA, driver or hardware
layers.


-- 
Joel Roth


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