[pulseaudio-discuss] Master is frozen

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

14.11.2014 11:07, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> Hello,
> As promised, master is now frozen. Please do not push anything other
> than essential fixes. I'd like to have some stability testing of HSP
> before rolling 6.0 RC1. Any help here is appreciated.

I would like to bring up again the topic of module-equalizer-sink.

A bit more than half a year ago, I proposed to remove it, because of 
really really really broken DSP. See my criticisms here:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2014-March/020174.html

None of them were addressed since then. However, my viewpoint has also 
changed.

Earlier, I proposed to suggest module-ladspa-sink + mbeq from 
swh-plugins + veromix as a replacement. However, upon inspection 
prompted on IRC by a user who tried to test it, it was found out that 
mbeq is also buggy. It has wrong gain under the default settings, and 
also doesn't try to ensure that the impulse response of the equalizer is 
short enough to fit in the difference between the FFT size and the 
window size. This leads to irregular artifacts with some players e.g. if 
the lowest frequency slider is not set at nearly the same position as 
the next one. Additionally, veromix is unmaintained. So, there is 
currently no solution to the "system-wide equalizer" problem in linux.

I understand that Tanu has resistance to removing features without 
replacement. Therefore, I don't propose removal (even though I should, 
because there cannot be any real users of this broken "feature", 
period). What I propose is to add a notice to the ./configure output in 
order to nag distributors who create false hope in users by including 
this broken module, and create a warning on module load. Also, we need 
to recruit some DSP specialists, as it is now obvious that the problem 
is not fixable without external help.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov