On Wednesday 04 November 2009 11:39:09 am John Andersen wrote:
On 11/4/2009 2:13 AM, Curtis Rey wrote:
OMG the pulse audio thing! I mean first there was OSS, then ALSA - and I understand this transition and thought that ALSA was doing OK. But then the pulse audio thing! UGH! What a pain.... and why?!?!
Same reason as the kde sound daemon ARTS or the Gnome daemon ESD.
Multiple applications need to use the sound card at once, and not all sound cards support multiple simultaneous inputs from multiple programs.
Because of the history on Linux, dozens of programs are written to support specific sound system APIs, and rewrites often come late or never.
So you launch something an get the dread "sound system is in use by another application" message.
Once you decide to hook all the old sound system APIs into a multiplexing daemon the ability to stream to another box presents itself as a cheap and easy target of opportunity. Its not that anyone set out to do that, its just that it gets really easy, like running an X server makes displays from multiple systems easy.
Pulse Audio is an attempt at a generic sound daemon, not tied to KDE or Gnome or anything else.
Read up on it Curtis, it has merit, its just that it is fairly new at this point in time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio
We may never be free of the OSS ALSA ESD ARTS sound wars, but we can paper over them and let the users get on with using the computer without constantly fighting the war.
I haven't had any problems with Pulse Audio, except for an occasional need to restart it after an upgrade.
Thanks John. Makes more sense now... This has been an area of considerable angst to me. I do a fair amount of audio engineering at home and various venues... I have to resort to using ProTools in Mac (not a problem overall - but expensive) or Cubase in XP (needs a pristine environment - e.g. that system only does Cubase and Audio... not network or anything else). I find some rather nice software for audio work.... Ardour ain't half bad IMHO. But the audio back ends have decidedly been the limiting factor. Now that JACK audio is stable I tend to set that up and have been experimenting for some time now.... Pulse worked very well in the Mandriva I was using, much to my surprise, considering my previous experience with it... A common/generic audio engine and prehaps a high-end/low latency engine are all that's needed. Jack does a fairly good job...Haven't seen an X overflow/fallover for a while now. Hears hoping that 11.2 will lay some of these issue to rest. Cheers and TY again. Curtis. -- BEWARE! Spammers will be shot, survivors will be shot again! Those throw objects at the alligators will be asked to retrieve them! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org