2008/3/12, Marcus Rueckert:

On 2008-03-12 16:39:32 +0100, Jan Matejek wrote:

...

phonon - um, not really? a) isn't phonon somehow limited to KDE4-based stuff? b) how about legacy applications? (pulse has pulse-oss or whatever it's called)

and pulse-oss will not fail as horrible as aoss did?

...

- - how about "every soundcard plays all the sound" ? or precise control of sources/sinks in GUI *and* real-time - let's say i want music to run through my high-end audiophiliac soundcard and stupid icq notification sounds through the built-in piece-of-crud AC97 into tiny speakers in my display? or something (yes, phonon is supposed to do that as well, see above)

actually all the features except network transparency belong into alsa.

and realtime through some suid binary is not really a good plan in first place.

just my 2 cents

darix

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In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing. pd. is opensuse-packaging the best place for this? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

...

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though. cu Ludwig -- (o_ Ludwig Nussel //\ V_/_ http://www.suse.de/ SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

On Wednesday 12 March 2008 22:46:51 wrote Wade Berrier:

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

...

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

...

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

...

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

...

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs 'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

Was there any problem in the last years ? I can only remeber that some sound cards, which do not support mixing where not configure with dmix. But beside of that, I think we got rid off all problems since that we dropped sound server in KDE 3 and used plain alsa. From that perspective, I fear more steps backward than forward with introducing a sound daemon again ... -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) email: adrian@suse.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

On Thursday 13 March 2008 00:43:08 wrote Wade Berrier:

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 22:59 +0100, Adrian Schröter wrote:

...

On Wednesday 12 March 2008 22:46:51 wrote Wade Berrier:

...

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

...

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

...

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

...

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

...

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs 'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

Was there any problem in the last years ?

Not so much when I had a card with at least 4 ports for hardware mixing, but when using a 1 port card, definitely yes. There always seem to be oss apps that hog my sound card.

Plus, as a gnome user, some apps still expect to output sound to esd (instead of going to gstreamer as they should).

hm, this sounds like esd still used /dev/dsp and caused this ? I haven't any problems anymore since 2-3 years after backporting the KDEMM (pre-Phonon) stuff to avoid fixing arts bugs ;)

And surely some headaches come from me trying to configure everything to work with pulse, but the features of pulse are important to me. I think it's doable to have both: features of pulse, all apps working.

...

I can only remeber that some sound cards, which do not support mixing where not configure with dmix. But beside of that, I think we got rid off all problems since that we dropped sound server in KDE 3 and used plain alsa.

From that perspective, I fear more steps backward than forward with introducing a sound daemon again ...

I agree there may be steps taken backwards in transition, but the feature set of pulse makes it possible to move ahead of where alsa alone is capable of.

just out of interest, when do you see these features used ? For an advanced user, who want to play remotely on his HiFi ? Or is it something like NMM as universal managing all multimedia devices around you, switching all video / audio playbacks/recordings from device to device ? bye adrian -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) email: adrian@suse.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 09:30 +0100, Adrian Schröter wrote:

On Thursday 13 March 2008 00:43:08 wrote Wade Berrier:

...

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 22:59 +0100, Adrian Schröter wrote:

...

On Wednesday 12 March 2008 22:46:51 wrote Wade Berrier:

...

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

...

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

...

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote: > In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. > For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or > yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE > can't patch all of them, correct? > GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and > another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or > gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon > uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the > first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls > (Phonon and PulseAudio)? > Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

...

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs 'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

Was there any problem in the last years ?

Not so much when I had a card with at least 4 ports for hardware mixing, but when using a 1 port card, definitely yes. There always seem to be oss apps that hog my sound card.

Plus, as a gnome user, some apps still expect to output sound to esd (instead of going to gstreamer as they should).

hm, this sounds like esd still used /dev/dsp and caused this ?

I haven't any problems anymore since 2-3 years after backporting the KDEMM (pre-Phonon) stuff to avoid fixing arts bugs ;)

...

And surely some headaches come from me trying to configure everything to work with pulse, but the features of pulse are important to me. I think it's doable to have both: features of pulse, all apps working.

...

I can only remeber that some sound cards, which do not support mixing where not configure with dmix. But beside of that, I think we got rid off all problems since that we dropped sound server in KDE 3 and used plain alsa.

From that perspective, I fear more steps backward than forward with introducing a sound daemon again ...

I agree there may be steps taken backwards in transition, but the feature set of pulse makes it possible to move ahead of where alsa alone is capable of.

just out of interest, when do you see these features used ? For an advanced user, who want to play remotely on his HiFi ?

Or is it something like NMM as universal managing all multimedia devices around you, switching all video / audio playbacks/recordings from device to device ?

The features I use/like: 1. Play my local sound across network with a nicer sound system, with no latency issues, as well as synchronous output to multiple computers (I have a computer upstairs and downstairs, and I can output the same music to both) 2. Plug in my usb soundcard with headphones and use the gui app to route all sound to usb sound card (which gets remembered next time I plug the usb sound device in) 3. Individual sound settings for each app, so I can adjust volume for apps that don't have software volume control (in which all settings are remembered the next time that app plays) 4. ability to use pasuspender for closed source apps/games that want to hog my sound device. Even if I have music playing, or any other app that has a hold on the sound device, I can suspend the sound server, and let the non-compatible app take control of the sound device. I really do understand that not everyone wants to use pulse :) As stated in my original mail, I'm not interested in debating over this, but was wondering if pulse was going to be distribution wide. (I was hoping it was going to be distribution wide, then there would be a better chance of 3rd party vendors' packages supporting pulse: ie packman.) Anyway, now that the answer to that question is clear, I would still like to see all apps working in whatever desktop, with and without a sound server. Wade

On Wednesday 12 March 2008 23:51:49 wrote Christian Morales Vega:

2008/3/12, Wade Berrier:

...

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

...

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

...

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

...

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

...

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs 'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

You can't use the software mixing argument. dmix *works*, perhaps doesn't works in all cases, but works. You have a sound card where dmix doesn't works (isn't being used?) and PulseAudio mixing does? Fine. But can you say for sure that PulseAudio mixing works for *everybody*? Because a single user for which PulseAudio mixing doesn't works and dmix works is enough to invalidate this argument. (You are a Novell employer? So just search Takashi Iwai in the building and he will fix your dmix problem for a free breakfast ;-)

I'm not against PulseAudio. But before patching packages like general rule we should know the KDE Team posture about it. If it still is the "it's just a Gnome thing" from http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2007-11/msg00175.html the only packages that should be touched are the ones that the Gnome Team is already touching: http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Ideas/11.0/PulseAudio

It is no problem to support a Phonon Pulseaudio plugin, but from my opinion it would be just unneeded overhead by default for the average user. KDE learned from the past and does not rely on any implementation like arts, pulseaudio, gstreamer, nmm, .... anymore ;) If you want to convince others to use pulseaudio also for KDE, you may want to write a plugin ;) Btw, is pulseaudio also supporting video ? Because Phonon is also the video interface for KDE now. bye adrian /me wonders what acctually happened to NMM, it looked for me like the real big solution for network related audio stuff quite some time ago. -- Adrian Schroeter SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) email: adrian@suse.de --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 23:51 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

2008/3/12, Wade Berrier:

...

Hi,

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 18:07 +0100, Ludwig Nussel wrote:

...

Marcus Rueckert wrote:

...

On 2008-03-12 17:45:05 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

...

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct? GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

ideally pulseaudio and phonon would be just wrapper for that functionally inside alsa.

Quoting the fedora-devel mail:

...

6. If you have an application that uses ALSA, please make sure that it doesn't hardcode ALSA driver names (i.e. something like "hw:0"), it should use "default" instead, which is now being redirected to "pulse", our plugin for libasound. Hardcoding ALSA device names (besides "default") is a bug in your application anyway, so here you have yet another reason to fix that!

So there is an alsa plugin and if an application normally uses alsa it will transparently use pulseaudio. No application change required. Sounds sane to me. I wonder whether that also works for applications that support surround sound such as quake4 though.

I'm not sure either... but, if it fails, this would be an instance where the real quake binary could be wrapped in a shell wrapper that also runs 'pasuspender' beforehand so that quake could use the hardware directly.

I brought this up on opensuse-packaging with the hope of preconfiguring all apps (patching our packages to: create wrappers, modify default config files, etc... ) so they would work with pulseaudio.

The goal: to be running any desktop environment, start up any application that uses sound, have sound actually work (even when using a cheap sound card that does no hardware mixing), and get all the features of pulseaudio.

(I'm currently using one of those cheap cards, but am almost frustrated at the point of buying a sound card that can mix 32 streams in hardware just so I can hear pidgin beeps and hear flash video at the same time :)

You can't use the software mixing argument. dmix *works*, perhaps doesn't works in all cases, but works. You have a sound card where dmix doesn't works (isn't being used?) and PulseAudio mixing does? Fine. But can you say for sure that PulseAudio mixing works for *everybody*? Because a single user for which PulseAudio mixing doesn't works and dmix works is enough to invalidate this argument.

You're right... it's not a differentiating argument, but it is another available solution.

(You are a Novell employer? So just search Takashi Iwai in the building and he will fix your dmix problem for a free breakfast ;-)

Heh, unfortunately he's probably in Germany, and I'm in Provo. But I wouldn't mind buying breakfast for him some time as he's fixed several other issues with some of my sound cards.

I'm not against PulseAudio. But before patching packages like general rule we should know the KDE Team posture about it. If it still is the "it's just a Gnome thing" from http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/2007-11/msg00175.html the only packages that should be touched are the ones that the Gnome Team is already touching: http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Ideas/11.0/PulseAudio

Thanks for the links! I didn't know these existed... Wade

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 17:45 +0100, Christian Morales Vega wrote:

2008/3/12, Marcus Rueckert:

...

On 2008-03-12 16:39:32 +0100, Jan Matejek wrote:

...

phonon - um, not really? a) isn't phonon somehow limited to KDE4-based stuff? b) how about legacy applications? (pulse has pulse-oss or whatever it's called)

and pulse-oss will not fail as horrible as aoss did?

...

- - how about "every soundcard plays all the sound" ? or precise control of sources/sinks in GUI *and* real-time - let's say i want music to run through my high-end audiophiliac soundcard and stupid icq notification sounds through the built-in piece-of-crud AC97 into tiny speakers in my display? or something (yes, phonon is supposed to do that as well, see above)

actually all the features except network transparency belong into alsa.

and realtime through some suid binary is not really a good plan in first place.

just my 2 cents

darix

-- openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux openSUSE is good for you www.opensuse.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org

In any case what openSUSE will do is something must be cleared. For what I understood Gnome is going to use PulseAudio yes or yes. Upstream will port their apps to PulseAudio and openSUSE can't patch all of them, correct?

GNOME apps don't need to be ported, using gstreamer directly, so they get pulseaudio or not depending on the setup, but apps don't need to deal with that

GStreamer, xine... they can't have a default output for KDE and another one for Gnome. KDE4 will use Phonon, that can use xine or gstreamer like backend. Will KDE4 apps use PulseAudio when Phonon uses gstreamer and ALSA directly when Phonon uses xine? In the first case apps will have *two* per application volume controls (Phonon and PulseAudio)? Without a clear path this could be very confusing.

yeah, it is indeed very confusing, so if KDE4 apps use gstreamer, they would be using pulseaudio when it is running, so KDE would do app->phonon->gstreamer->pulseaudio in that case :-( -- Rodrigo Moya

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