Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kde (192 mails)

[Cristian Morales Vega <cmorve69@xxxxxxxx>]

2009/8/7 Malte Gell <malte.gell@xxxxxx>:
> Cristian Morales Vega <cmorve69@xxxxxxxx> wrote
>
> > 2009/8/7 Malte Gell <malte.gell@xxxxxx>:
> > > Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@xxxxxxx> wrote
> > >
> > > >  There is fate feature #305888 (Disable Pulse Audio by default).
> > >
> > > What are the reasons to disable PA by default? Since arts is gone, why
> > > should KDE4 be left without any sound server at all? Most sound cards do
> > > not support hardware mixing, this means you *need* a sound server to play
> > > audio from several sourced at once, e.g. playing music while wathcing
> > > some video on the web. Wouldn't a clean integration of a sound server
> > > like PA make sense?
>
> > When the sound card doesn't supports HW mixing ALSA uses dmix by
> > default since a long time ago. There is no need for a sound server if
> > the only thing you want is software mixing.
>
> How can I check, whether dmix is correctly running? I just noticed, without
> sound server I was not able to listen to MP3 music and to e.g. KDE system
> sound at the same time... And when I used Skype I was not able to use a media
> player at the same time, so I guess I don't have a running dmix plugin?

About the dmix thing... no idea, it's supposed to work always
automatically (note that OSS apps or ALSA apps using hw: or plughw:
could block it). You will have to ask in the ALSA ML.

> PA allows other useful things too, so one can use different volume settings 
> for
> different audio sources. For example use low volume for system sound while
> wathcing some stuff on the web browser :-)

Yes, (when works) it also has a lower power consumption and the
network transparency is nice to have.
Per-application sound control is *the* thing that would make me vote
for PulseAudio. But we need an app that supports the PA mixer API.
Change KMix for pavucontrol isn't IMHO an option for KDE.

I just looked to KMix... it links to libpulse-mainloop-glib and
libpulse, but looking at the source
(http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdemultimedia/kmix/mixer_pulse.cpp?view=markup)
the support doesn't seems to be very complete.
And looking at the app, at Help->Hardware Information it says:

Sound drivers supported: ALSA + OSS + PulseAudio
Sound drivers used: ALSA

...but I see no way to change that to use PulseAudio.

If KMix doesn't supports PulseAudio and there is no other *KDE* mixer
app that supports it then IMHO PulseAudio is out of the question.
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