On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 07:37:34 -0600 Stephen Doonan <stephen.doonan(a)gmail.com> wrote: Personally I've had virtually no contact with it. The only App. of mine that uses it is Audacity, and I find it's behaviour very strange when trying to get it to work with jack. -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk

On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:38:58 -0600 Stephen Doonan <stephen.doonan(a)gmail.com> wrote: Oops :) -- Will J Godfrey http://www.musically.me.uk

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

Jeremy Henty <onepoint(a)starurchin.org> writes: Wrong; it complements jack very well. There was some talk about merging jack into pulseaudio, though. Yes, that's the normal use case if you're a pro audio user and want normal audio apps to work. Jack is low level, ie only single mono channels; it deals with synchronization and interconnection among applications. Pulse is higher level; it deals with streams, like 5.1 audio and is only intended to communicate with the server, ie no interconnection. Both do network. They complement each other perfectly;). -- Esben Stien is b0ef@e s a http://www. s t n m irc://irc. b - i . e/%23contact sip:b0ef@ e e jid:b0ef@ n n

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, 31 Aug 2008 07:37:34 -0600, Stephen Doonan wrote: Hi Stephen, as others have said PulseAudio and Jack are somewhat the same thing and they complements one to each other. They are all "sound server" like ESD and aRTS but with some difference in the target audience: * PulseAudio is a desktop sound server with implements stream mixing, network transparency, sample caching, and more * Jack is a pro audio sound server that can connect different applications together with an emphasis on latency and sample syncro... and from the PA or Jack point of view Alsa is just the sound card driver. You can read some more about PulseAudio here: http://pulseaudio.org/ And to be complete not everyone likes PulseAudio. http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2008/06/pulseaudio-solution- in-search-of.html The response from Lennart Poettering main PulseAudio developer (in this post he explains better than me the scope of PA): http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey-stedfast.html Kind regards, Andrea

Andrea Del Signore wrote: I see. Thank you for the explanation. That might explain Lennart Poettering's remark at: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-October/msg00136.html "...Gustavo brought up the issue that PA "hogs" the sound device. Sure we do. The idea is having everything go through PA, so that we can treat everything the same. However, since there are some APIs that are notoriously hard to virtualize (e.g. OSS with mmap) and some areas where you don't want the extra context-switching PA adds (pro audio, for now)..." Thank you for that link. It is very interesting reading and good information from the lead developer of PulseAudio. To me, after reading some of this and other material, it seems that PulseAudio is a noble effort to bring a lot of good things to dealing with audio within a typical desktop computer. However, for those interested specifically in audio applications and associated programs such as jack, Ardour, etc., it may be better--for the present, anyway--to disable or circumvent PulseAudio and rely on the already-working-well combination of jack and alsa. Perhaps with further development PulseAudio will work well with, and not cause any or many issues with, the audio and audio/MIDI applications that we as linux-audio-users spend some considerable time with. :-) Steve

Cory K. wrote: But Audacity uses PortAudio for input (right?) and that is where PulseAudio was causing problems. Disabling PulseAudio in Ubuntu, in both System-->Preferences-->Sound and System-->Preferences-->Sessions, solved the problems I was having. -Steve

I tried PulseAudio yesterday. I have 2 soundcards, the one from my motherboard and a layla3g. I use to play sounds with amarok on the layla3g buit when i want to launch jackd i have to stop amarok. I wanted to launch jack at the sart of the session and still be able to play sounds on the layla3g with amarok. So i compiled xine with PulseAudio USE flag to see if PulseAudio can do anything about this. And i'am glad to see that it's working quite well. With PulseAudio volume control, i can route amarok sound to the embedded sound cards or the jack server. Changes are saved. I can quit amarok and if i launch it again it still uses the jack output. Let see what i 'have done. I activated the realtime option in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. I made a custom default.pa in ~/.pulse/ using the one in /etc/pulse and i added this line: load-module module-jack-sink channels=2 channel_map=front-left,front-right In QjackCtl, i launch pulseaudio after the jackd's start. finally i made a custom gnome session launcher for QjackCtl. There is only minor issues. I tried pulse audio device chooser but it seems it crash PulseAudio when i change default sink or source. Now i would like to launch Pulse audio like a standard sound server or a system daemon and load the module jack-sink when i start jack but i cant manage to achieve this. There is a pactl command line wich loads or unload modules. This way i could restart jack without restarting Pulseaudio as well. But when i do # pactl load-module module-jack-sink I get an error So if one of you have have an idea... Guillaume