[pulseaudio-discuss] /.

[Reece Dunn]

2009/10/20 Daniel Chen <seven.steps at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Jeremy Nickurak
> <pulseaudio-discuss at trk.nickurak.ca> wrote:
>> Maybe the distributions broke it, and have never really fixed it (Ubuntu
>> certainly isn't following the "Perfect Setup" advice, even in karmic AFAICT.
>> Audio goes to pulse if and only if it the app expressly requests a
>> connection to the pulseaudio daemon, which of course causes problems)
>
> While Ubuntu has done really bad things[0], Luke and I really don't
> intentionally break anyone's audio. In fact, since Jaunty/9.04, all
> audio in Ubuntu is routed through PulseAudio (in Ubuntu, cf.
> /usr/share/alsa/pulse*). (The bits were there for Intrepid/8.10, but
> the integration arguably was shabby.)
>
> The complication is that certain Ubuntu derivatives (e.g., Xubuntu,
> Kubuntu) don't ship PulseAudio, so configuring all the backends to use
> PulseAudio would cause further integration issues. It's not an ideal
> situation by any stretch.

It would be interesting to see:
  *  which distributions people are having issues with;
  *  which sound cards and alsa drivers people are having issues with;
  *  which version of alsa, linux-kernel and pulseaudiio they are
using (plus any other relevant systems);
  *  which programs are playing up and in what configurations;
  *  what usage patterns are causing issues.

For the record, sound was for me on Ubuntu 9.04, but I kept
experiencing intermittent sound glitches/periods of silence. This is
using the snd-hda-intel driver on a HP Pavillion dv9000. I can't
confirm it working on current 9.10 as I switched to OSS4 and the
upgrade broke everything (reinstalling alsa worked; not tried PA yet).

I suspect that the issues may have been made worse as a result of
intensive/demanding computer use (e.g. listening to music while
compiling and browsing the web). This may be better in 9.10 (it is
definitely a lot snappier) with the use of Con Colvas' scheduler,
IIUC.

When I get around to re-installing 9.10 (probably some time after
release), I will post my experiences here and coordinate with upstream
packages and Ubuntu to help resolve the issues (if there are any),
without doing a knee-jerk "remove pulseaudio" reaction.

- Reece