Folderol wrote: Audacity uses PortAudio, not PulseAudio, right? Two different things, which only adds to the confusion (in my mind). :-) I just wonder whether, from a Linux audio/MIDI users point of view, PulseAudio is intended to become a replacement for ALSA (and that therefore I ought to learn more about PulseAudio) or whether it will be regarded as more of a nuisance, another level of complexity, and that it might be better to try to be pure ALSA instead, with Gnome and KDE sound servers disabled if possible. PulseAudio, ESD, aRts, ALSA, jack, and all of their various interactions, overlapping and possibly mutually exclusive functions, conflicts, etc., seem to have the potential to create some very confusing and difficult problems and troubleshooting. I think I'll scour the 'net a little and read about PulseAudio to become a little more familiar with exactly what it is and why it exists, what issues it addresses and what isssues it causes. :-) Steve

On Sunday 31 August 2008 17:48, Folderol wrote: Hi Will. Just stick to writing music, and by the way we havn't had anything from you lately. If pulseaudio does turn up as a new package when you update, and the sound was working just fine before that, then just disable the darned thing, as it can cause problems that didn't exist before. I've used Alsa since Fedora Core 1, but come Fedora 8, pulseaudio is now installed as default, and the sounds with my Audigy2 soundblaster card, no longer worked. Removing the package "alsa-plugins-pulseaudio" got the sounds working again. Thankfully none of my other distros, Debian, Kubuntu, or Archlinux have forced Pulseaudio onto me. Nigel.

Folderol wrote: Personally I love to hear what everybody's doing, and I can say from my heart that some of the music that made the greatest impact on me in the last three years has come from this list! I understand that there are others (better) ways to communicate a compositional outlet, but I like the post here. Also I think is gives a nice balance to have geeky stuff (like vim syntax highlighting for csound and compiling a patched realtime kernel) AND fantastic art AND everything in between. I generally prefer to add some spice with that clean zynaddsubfx sound. I quite like the melody, but somehow felt it needs some pauses, as it is it sounds a bit hectic. But I only listened once, so don't take it too seriously... -- Atte http://atte.dk http://modlys.dk

Regarding PulseAudio -------------------- Miscellaneous quotes from the 'net At an Audacity forum -------------------- For many professional level audio applications, high performance and low latency are key features, which is something that JACK is specifically designed to do. On the other side of the coin, Pulseaudio hogs the sound system, making it difficult for high performance music applications to achieve the performance levels that they require. With Amarok, you are usually only trying to read one stereo file from the hard drive and play it, but with Audacity you may need to write a stereo stream to the hard drive, while simultaneously playing another 30 tracks from the hard drive. At the Fedora project Summer Coding, 2008 ideas webpage http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SummerCoding/2008/Ideas ------------------------------------------------------- We use PulseAudio by default in Fedora, and I don't really see the point of using Jack if we use PulseAudio for "normal" users (most users won't be changing that default). At at discussion at KDE.org http://dot.kde.org/1193780926/1193876887/ ----------------------------------------- In an interview with the Fedora man responsible (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering), he talked about it being all about "ear candy" and a "compiz for sound" e.g. active window has sound at 100%, other window's sounds are at 20%; clicking left button makes sound come out of left speaker and same with right. Will Phonon offer similar features or will it need PulseAudio to offer this functionality? My current impression of PulseAudio-- PulseAudio is an attempt to make various audio needs and desires "just work" for "normal users" of a computer. It tries to hide the complexities of both audio routing and the various needs of various audio-needing programs by doing as much as it (PulseAudio) can by itself without user interaction nor (importantly for linux audio users) user configuration. I currently use Ubuntu Hardy Heron with the default Gnome desktop environment and most of the UbuntuStudio packages installed. I have an M-Audio Delta 1010 soundcard and various outboard gear (MIDI tone generators, keyboards, electronic drums, mixers, etc.) The audio and MIDI programs I normally use are Ardour, Rosegarden, Muse (and now learning Qtractor), Jamin, Qjackctl, Audacity. With my new installation of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and PulseAudio, in all its parts and pieces, installed and enabled by default, I have experienced numerous problems, crashed, UN-interoperability between programs, unavailability of the sound card to many applications including Gnomes own System-->Preferences-->Sound configurator--a whole heck of a lot of frustrating issues. For example, Audacity's preferences for Audio I/O offered no devices to use for recording or playback with PulseAudio running in the background. Perhaps PulseAudio could be configured, or has a module or plugin, to remedy this problem. But PulseAudio is protected from the user (with little easy user configuration) just at is tries to protect the user from the complexities of audio. It's like PulseAudio is saying to the user: "I'll do what I can to make audio easy for you, but you have to keep away from me and leave me alone." This might sound good to an "average or 'normal' user," but it sure does scare me as a person who likes to do more with audio than Skype, live streaming radio, etc. What can I do about it?-- Well, I think I may have found a simple solution, a way to keep PulseAudio from taking over my audio-related resources. In Gnome, it's this: * In System-->Preferences-->Sound, in the Devices tab, change all Sound playback and Sound capture options so that something _other_than_ "Autodetect" or "PulseAudio Sound Server" is selected. I changed all of mine to "ALSA - Advanced Linux Sound Architecture." * In System-->Preferences-->Sessons, disable (UNcheckmark) "PuleAudio Device Chooser" and "PulseAudio Session Management." * Log out of Gnome, then log back in for the changes above to take effect. Those settings are persistent from login to login and bootup to bootup unless and until you change them again. Yippee! Now Audacity, though it still uses PortAudio, offers and allows me to choose from various devices (OSS, ALSA, etc.) for recording and playback in its Audio I/O preferences, Jamin doesn't hang and then offer no ports for IN or OUT, Ardour and Jamin can both be launched after I launch Qjackctl without crashing or hanging, I can launch Qjackctl without it having weird interactions with PulseAudio that make some things not work, and which requires an additional module to be installed so that PulseAudio will work with jack, when neither PulseAudio nor that module are really needed, etc. Anyway, so far, so good--things seem to be working again. :-) Steve

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 09:38:58AM -0600, Stephen Doonan wrote: Reading the PulseAudio site and following a few links it looks to me as though PulseAudio is essentially a replacement for jack, ie. it's a server that links sound applications together. On ALSA-only systems it uses ALSA to connect to the hardware. However it looks as though it can also sit on top of JACK: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/Modules#JACKConnectivity http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-548178.html I'd like to know what PulseAudio offers that jack doesn't. Is it the networking? Regards, Jeremy Henty