[LAU] pulse/systemd - was: FreeBSD

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2015, Tim E. Real wrote:

> I think PulseAudio is a masterpiece.
> When I discovered just how deeply and intimately it deals with hardware
> I was impressed by its breadth and scope.
>
> Having said that, well, I still find it a little weird and unusual, a bit
> hard to follow what it does, how it works, and how to use it and
> get the most out of it. But it's there and just works, for desktop audio.
> But I am a "Jack head" after all, like a lot of us...

I mostly agree. PA is the best solution I have found for dealing with 
desktop audio from a user POV as it "just works". Any PA replacements I 
have heard about are IMO more work than they are worth as it seems each 
application then has to be reset to point to the right audio and there are 
still problems. Dealing with PA means just dealing with one application 
and getting it to understand that it's device is not ALSA but rather Jack. 
So far I have been just turning all the ALSA devices "off" in PA which 
works fine for me as I don't have any USB AIs I plug and unplug anyway.

I have been thinking that I would like to blacklist the ALSA sink/source 
module for PA which would be a better solution. It would mean that there 
is no audio unless jack is running... but so what, I run jack at session 
start anyway. If Jack crashes then PA sinks to dummy and life goes on. 
None of the desktop apps freezes in any of these cases and restarting jack 
gets sound as soon as PA finds it. I set qjackctl to not start or stop 
jack at application open/close so I only use it for the connection pannel.

It is just a different way of thinking, I use PA as a front end for jack 
rather than looking at PA as the system sound server. It is not one or the 
other, both together. I have been running this way close to a year now and 
have been very happy with the way it works.

> PS: Does anyone know if there are plans to do PA midi?

There doesn't seem to be a need for it as more than one application can 
already send/receive MIDI data to the same port at a time. Also, there are 
really no desktop applications that need MIDI.

systemd is another thing. It's idea is to improve startup/shutdown time to 
compete with other OS by starting more than one process at a time. It also 
allows triggering the startup of one app from the readiness of another 
rather than a sequence of things.

Is it good or bad? I don't know. I feel init style stuff is easier to 
change... and I don't want to learn something new. I'm Lazy.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net