[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio elusive

[Jack Tanner]

Colin Guthrie <gmane <at> colin.guthr.ie> writes:

> Yeah, I think more needs to be done here to make it more obvious. In 
> actual fact a usability "improvement" was to default to the "Sinks" tab 
> if no streams are running, but in actual fact if it started with a blank 
> pane and some text saying "No active streams. This pane will list blah, 
> blah blah" would actually be better for first time users etc.

To me, the PA metaphor seems really suited to a directed graph visualization --
boxes and arrows kind of stuff. Sources and sinks all get to be boxes, and links
between them between them get to be ... arrows. (Someone has to have thought of
this before.) I think Conduit implements a similar GUI.

> >> pavucontrol also let's you set the "default" sink, so that brand new 
> >> streams will go through your preferred device by default. This does not 
>
> Well there is a little drop down thing that you can use without right 
> clicking but I agree it's non-obvious.

There's only one option under that drop-down, right? Just lose the drop-down,
and put the Default checkbox in its place.

> The main trouble is there are not enough volunteers pushing this app 
> forward (or creating other apps).

The other main trouble is all these users suggesting brilliant ideas. ;)

> eventually this should be exposed via some kind of editor but we need to 
>   change the protocol to do this. Arguably it should not be stored in 
> ~/.pulse either but rather inside the XGD ~/.config tree.

What is the "unit" of this state? Is it per application? Does it remember
/usr/bin/vlc as a source? What happens if I upgrade vlc on that machine?

So, I managed to get things running under PA. Whoo! And then I tried to watch a
movie and the audio and video were all choppy. The movie was a local file (i.e.,
no network latencies), and it was choppy in both vlc and mplayer. PA was using
about 20% of CPU, so I'm wondering if it's the culprit. How can I bypass PA and
use alsa directly to test this? It's easy enough to tell VLC to use ALSA, but
then I get no sound...