[pulseaudio-discuss] Expected level of ALSA/OSS compatibility

[Neilen Marais]

Hi,

I'm using PulseAudio as shipped with Ubuntu Feisty. The concept is
great, and being able to adjust individual audio stream volumes is just
fantastic! It's solved some of my audio problems, but not quite as well as
I'd have liked. For better or worse, good ALSA and OSS compatibility will
be needed.

So, I'd like to know what is the ultimate level of ALSA/OSS compatibility
that can be expected? Are there certain things that just can't be emulated
by a non-kernel deamon? I've googled a bit, but can't seem to find any
definite answers. And if I find apps that don't want to work with the
ALSA/OSS emulation, should I report them all as bugs?

FWIW, my experiences so far have been:

libao apps: Ubuntu ships the PA plugin, works like a charm.

XMMS: Ubuntu doesn't ship the pulseaudio plugin, so out of lazyness I
tried talking to PA through both ALSA and ESD output plugins, neither of
which worked. A connection seems to get created with pulseaudio (I can see
"ALSA plug-in [xmms]" in paman), but xmms claims there is a problem with
the audio device.  I compiled and installed the PulseAdio xmms plugin
myself, which works, so I'm happy with XMMS support now.

Audacity: Can't get it to work; it simply doesn't list the PA ALSA
devices, and gives me an error if I try to use padsp (see
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/107207 )

mplayer: Don't have the PA patch applied yet. PA ALSA emulation doesn't
work, padsp strangely does work quite well.

totem-xine: Again the ubuntu version doesn't seem to include a PA plugin,
but the PA ALSA emulation seems to work a treat.

Anyway, keep up the good work!

Regards
Neilen