2008/3/11, Wade Berrier <wberrier@novell.com>:
Hello,
On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 23:19 +0100, Adrian Schröter wrote:
On Tuesday 11 March 2008 19:17:47 wrote Wade Berrier:
Hi,
I know that PulseAudio is going to be the default sound server for Gnome. Will it also be for KDE (or better yet, is it going to be a distribution wide sound server?)
I can not tell what is planned, but we were happy to get rid of any extra server process some years ago, because it can hurt sometimes and is not needed anymore, what means it is just overhead (because either alsa does mixing or hardware itself).
The reason I ask is because it would be great if all packages in the distro were pre-configured to work against pulseaudio. That way no matter what desktop environment you're using, sound will just work for all apps.
well, it should be no problem if some apps use direct alsa and if some other app gets started later what uses pulseaudio. At least as long pulseaudio daemon gets started automatically (I see no reason why it should run always) and pulseaudio itself is using alsa as well.
The idea would be to have pulseaudio go stright to hw:0, and not use dmix for either pulseaudio, or anything else. That way the dmix issues can be avoided, and all the cool features of pulse can be used. Currently, I must stop pulseaudio to run this app, reconfigure alsa to run that app, etc...
What issues dmix has? You don't need to configure it manually anymore, and the classic "mixing should be done in kernel" complain isn't "solved" by PulseAudio. Also, would be good to know exactly what are the cool features of PulseAudio that ALSA hasn't. - Network transparency? Yes, it's cool, but will not be so much used. - Per application volumen control? Isn't Phonon going to give us the same? - ?