[pulseaudio-discuss] Few questions about pulseaudio

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Maxim Levitsky at 29/01/09 18:55 did gyre and gimble:
> Here on ubuntu 8.10, it works nicely, I now reinstall in on all my
> systems.

If you used 8.04 then I'm not surprised you were disappointed. Ubuntu 
did a pretty bad job of integrating pulseaudio into the system which 
really didn't reflect well on us (but more so on them!)

> I have few questions though:
> 
> * Is this possible to make skype record from pulseaudio (I call it PA
> from now on)?
> 
> Playback through skype works fine now, and thanks, but I would like to
> do same with recording.
> 
> I am asking this, as maybe you created a workaround for this in dev
> version of skype.

I'm not sure but I think I remember Lennart talking about fixing the 
recording interface a bit recently. We'll see if he comments :)

> * It seems that PA supports network sound, I found this to be very nice
> feature, for example I could play sounds remotely, but how I connect to
> remote server, but without disabling to auth system?

On each machine, there should be a ~/.pulse-cookie file. If you you 
forgoe the automatic loading via module-zeroconf-discover and load the 
module-tunnel-sink manually, you can add the argument cookie=<filename> 
to allow auth.

I am planning on working on a notification and simple input structure in 
pulse whenever Lennart commits support for integrating with the GLib 
mainloop. It should form the basis to ask for things like a password 
etc. when connecting so future versions make this slightly more user 
friendly.


> * Is it possible to combine input from several cards together?
> This would be cool for karaoke, as I could combine input of monitor of
> sound player with microphone, and record from that.

There is module-combine (which works on sinks), so I guess there is 
scope for someone to write a module-combine-source too. It's not 
currently possible tho'.

> * pulseaudio mixer seems to be build around input and output devices.
> each device has just one volume, but each device can have several
> inputs, but currently PA doesn't allow to configure that, will  (is)
> that (be) possible?

I think the development version of PA handles this better. it should 
autoprobe for different device configurations etc.


> * If I choose to kill a sound stream in pa settings, this makes
> corresponding app stall (even with native PA interface, like rhythmbox)
> (I set gstreamer to use PA)

I've not played yet but gstreamer's pulse plugin has received some 
recent love that will be in their next release.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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