[CS-FSLUG] Linux Audio: PulseAudio

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Ubuntu, PulseAudio is the default now. I've struggled to get it working a
couple times when it has failed. It has much to give, but doesn't seem to be
near flawless yet in my experience. I really like being able to shift output
and input between headphones, microphones and speakers.

Audacity needs to be either revived or replaced soon. In the Linux
environment, I've found it to be a consistent hassle to setup for recording
for awhile.

JSR/

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Jonathan E. Brickman
<jeb at joshuacorps.org>wrote:

> OK, I just started learning some lessons on PulseAudio.  The biggest one
> is, I think I see why it is needed.  The list of Linux software sound
> systems is amazingly chaotic, but for the first time, I followed a simple
> recipe and saw things work: the Pulse team is the first one which seems to
> work hard to get everything working.
>
> For one example, Adobe Flash audio.  For web multimedia, it is essential
> today.  I had five different distros do Flash audio for a while, and then
> stop.  I had two (and multiple versions of Ubuntu...) never work at all.  In
> every case, I studied what was in use, learned that it was trying to use
> things already present and running, followed instructions et cetera, and
> they never worked.
>
> But Flash 10 supports Pulse.  Adobe folk must have been impressed.  Once I
> had Pulse working, it worked, and very stably, a big difference.  And there
> was a way before; I don't understand how it worked, but it did exist.
>
> I also now think I know one very good reason why KDE 3 had to be thrown
> out:  it is very aRts-integrated for sound.  aRts is an audio system no
> longer in development: its leader declared 2-3 years ago that he no longer
> believes its fundamental design principles are good, and that it deserves to
> be abandoned, so he abandoned it.  There is a page on the aRts site with the
> text, it is an educational read.  I agree with him :-)  aRts used to do
> awful things for me every time I tried to depend on it.  Perhaps its most
> seriously troubling aspect, was that it ran nearer the KDE high-level, and
> far from kernel-level, which means audio/video sync was often bad, and the
> kernel could not babysit the audio hardware as it badly needs to do,
> resulting in all sorts of crashes and hangs.
> Perhaps we need to compare KDE 3 to Windows 95, and KDE 4.1 to XP.  Things
> are not that simple, but the type of analogy remains.
>
> Another example.  Audacity (a powerful yet newby-usable audio editor) is a
> hold-out project; reportedly development has slowed quite a lot lately.  But
> the Pulse people have something for such cases:  it will run, with a small
> change of launch icon, which simply turns Pulse off for the duration of the
> run.  I tried it; it is seamless.
> J.E.B.
>
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