Re: [LAD] Do professionals use Pulse Audio? ; xfce4-mixer

On Wed, 25 Apr 2018, Philip Rhoades wrote: Having some kind of ALSA mixer is still required. Pulse controls levels as a mix of sound card and digital gain stage levels. You have no way of knowing what it is really doing. This is great for desktop use, absolutely useless for any kind of profesional use. Note that input levels are worse as pulse uses a mix of input level, input/mic boost (even on aux inputs) and digital gain stage. An interesting experiment is to run alsamixer and watch the audio card control levels while adjusting pulse's one level control full range. Input levels on the internal audio card will see the input level go up then bounce to 0 as the boost is set up a notch then the level goes up again, then down plus more boost. I have found that each boost level has it's own unique noise that I can work around with alsamixer that pulse tramples all over. Pulse offers no guaranty of any particular audio card being used for sync or of any source not having SRC applied. Pulse offers no guaranty of no drop outs or stable latency. Pulse offers no guaranty that some other application (skype is particularely bad) will not change your audio card levels for you. pulse makes a good audio front end for desktop applications so long as Jackd is it's _only_ output. The Pulse-jackd bridge appears to be set up as a client (using jack terms) rather than a device or back end. This means that even when another device connected to pulse is not being used for output, pulse continues to rely on it for sync :P This means that jack free wheel will not work correctly if pulse has a connection to any audio HW.

I personally use jackdbus as my audio server, started at session start. I use pulse as a desktop front end with the pulse-jack bridge, but with the udev and alsa modules removed so that jackd is it's only audio in/output. This means pulse does not ever control audio device levels, and free wheel works correctly. Jack (or alsa direct) is the only way to do profesional audio is you want bit perfect throughput. Pulse offers no such thing. I agree pulseaudio has improved a whole lot, but it is no replacement for jack or alsa direct. Alsa direct is great except if you want to be able to mix two audio sources without stopping your proaudio application. I have no comments on xfce4-mixer. I don't use it because I have an ice1712 based card that has it's own much better control utility (mudita24) and I find qasmixer (and it's extra tools) easier to use. I also still use alsamix in a terminal because it is faster to access in many cases :) So I am not of the "pulse must be removed" community, but I still feel that pulse is a long way from usable in any kind of profesional audio (or even semiprofesional) environment. I would even go so far as to say it never will be because it's original design goal was as an easy to use desktop application/server. The possibility to do pro-audio would require starting over not patching. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev(a)lists.linuxaudio.org https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev