[LAU] pulse/systemd - was: FreeBSD

[Len Ovens]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2015, Philipp Überbacher wrote:

> Why do you use PA as intermediate layer at all? You could just route
> all alsa programs to jack. Alsa at least does what it should instead of
> doing weird things on its own.

Just? Just routing all programs to alsa means each or any blocks all 
others. One ends up with the mess that at least three audio servers have 
been tried of which Pulse seems to be the one that has been chosen

> [rant]
exactly

> There is this telephony program called jitsi. On Linux it can either
> use Portaudio or Pulseaudio. The portaudio implementation is broken,

As is portaudio itself. (IMO)

> of running this program. What pulseaudio did was really weird. Every
> time a call came in it set the mic volume to maximum. It did not just
> set some software volume level, no, it did set the hardware levels, the

Did you read what I wrote before? It would seem not, easier to rant. Use 
Jack as the audio device and this will never happen. Really, The best 
audio setup is to use pulse as a front end for jack for any program that 
does not deal well (or at all) with jack. I agree the pulse/ALSA interface 
is less than great, but the front end that pulse shows the applications is 
about the best there is. Jack on the other hand works really well with 
alsa, but lots of apps have chosen not to work well with jack (it does not 
seem hard to deal well with jack), so use each for what it is good at.

I do look for applications that will deal directly with jack first. The 
choices in VoIP all seem to work best with Pulse though. (Skype being the 
big one)

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net