Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (341 mails)

[Benji Weber <benji@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/2/23 Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@xxxxxx>:
> Hello,
>
> PulseAudio has been one of the major sources of complaints and of
> problems for both the 11.0 and 11.1 release, with significant annoyances
> for openSUSE users, as reported on IRC and on local forums.

The problems I have with pulseaudio are outlined below (I have not
filed bug reports yet as I'm quite happy having disabled it, and can't
work out how to turn it back on, if someone can suggest how... :). The
hardware is a creative (emu10k1 of some variety and I've had no
problems with audio with these devices except with pulseaudio. Even 9
years ago there were no audio problems that compare with the problems
I experience with pulseaudio.

* It breaks hardware mixing

Without pulseaudio I can play music in a music player, and run games
that output to alsa directly. I hear both the music and the audio from
the game. With pulseaudio this doesn't work, I hear only the output
from the music player. It locks the sound device. Sure you could say
the non-free unmaintained software should be rewritten to use PA but
that's not going to happen.

* Poor Audio Quality

With pulseaudio audio music like it is played through excessively
cheap headphones regardless of the player. I have no idea what causes
this but disabling pulseaudio fixes it.

* High CPU usage

With pulseaudio playing music requires 10-20% of a core and noticibly
slows down my machine. Without pulseaudio this is more like 1-2%

* It breaks the volume control

With pulseaudio for some reason each output channel seems to be
adjusted independently when I just raise/lower the master volume.
Which is quite disconcerting.

* It provides me with zero benefit

Other than networked sound. Who wants to use this, seriously?


> As a consequence it is worth to consider the possibility to disable it by
> default on freshly installed systems for openSUSE 11.2.

Surely the question is whether there is a compelling reason to enable
it by default given the problems everyone seems to experience with it?
Multiple audio outputs at once? No we've had that for years, in fact
PA breaks it.

--
Benjamin Weber
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