[pulseaudio-tickets] [Bug 94165] Soundblaster (hw:0) is not seen by PA, works in Yast

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94165

--- Comment #13 from Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi> ---
(In reply to Jogchum Reitsma from comment #11)
> Thanks for your (and Raymond's) quick responses!
> 
> Timidity is a daemon, started as a system service in the boot process.
> That's why the process runs as root.
> 
> So if you mean to test the behavior when started as a normal user, that can
> be done of course. Please let me know if that's what you mean.

I mean that if you can configure timidity to run not as root, but as your
regular user, you should be able to make timidity and pulseaudio cooperate, by
making timidity connect to pulseaudio instead of using the sound card directly.

> But normal behavior is starting the daemon on boot, as root. 

I guess you mean it's normal for timidity. It's certainly not normal for audio
programs in general, for a good reason. A daemon that keeps the sound card open
all the time is very bad, if you want to use the sound card with any other
software.

> The extin and extout is asked by Raymond in comment #2.
> 
> There must be many soundblasters and other cards around with mixing
> capabilities. I can hardly believe that I am the only one that uses that
> functionality in Linux-land?

It's very rare to want to use hardware mixing. I can't name any good reason why
that would be required, and indeed many (I'd guess most) sound cards don't
support it at all.

> To be more precise, mixing is not what is done
> here: the timidity-daemon (used to play midi-files) lies "sleeping" till a
> midi-file has to be played. It is - in my use case - never really mixed with
> other sound sources. Still one would want to play a Youtube-movie, a CD or
> something on disk, without stopping the timidity-daemon, and starting that
> anew to play a midi-file.
> 
> But there must be many use cases that do really mixing sounds; otherwise
> Soundblaster wouldn't bother to build it, I would say.

I don't know why Soundblaster cards bother with hardware mixing nowadays. In
ancient history that was probably done to save some CPU, and maybe also the
reality was that operating systems didn't provide audio mixing capabilities.

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