[pulseaudio-discuss] Introduction

[Alex Malinovich]

On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 18:30 -0700, Karl Larsen wrote:
> Vasili Sviridov wrote:
--snip--
>     Your right I can't ask a good question because I am not using it. If 
> you know, were can I d/l a tar ball or rpm of the latest version, and 
> what is the latest version? I may find it on the web page and will look. 
> Then install it if possible and test it and report here how it works.

You can get the latest tarball from pulseaudio.org directly.
(http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/DownloadPulseAudio) I would imagine that
there are pretty recent RPM's available of it as Lennart (the primary
developer) works for Red Hat.

> The purpose of a sound server proxy is unclear to me now.

There are quite a few good reasons for PA, but the primary ones, IMO,
are the following:

1) Allowing simultaneous access to the sound card from multiple
applications. (Many ALSA drivers don't support hardware mixing in the
soundcard, so you have to use dmix which isn't very good IMHO.)
2) Network support. PA has EXCELLENT support for sending audio over the
network. With a proper Avahi setup it's as simple as clicking on a
stream in the PA GUI and moving it to a different machine.
3) Support for multiple interfaces. Whether an application uses ALSA,
SDL, ESD, OSS, or any other of a number of sound libraries, Pulse will
handle it all (mostly) transparently.

-- 
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
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