[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio 0.16-test4 - my experience

[Maxim Levitsky]

So I carefully set everything up for it, and it now works (except 32 bit
compat libraries for skype )

Speaking of 32 bit compat libraries, is there a tutorial how to compile
these? (It isn't trivial, since I need alsa, pa libraries and plugins
for alsa)


1 - all sounds played through libcanberra (using pulse backend) (which
was installed from source (everything from latest git branches), play on
right speaker only, and this is confirmed by pavucontrol which display
the volume for notify sound briefly (which I consider a bug on its own,
because this makes it impossible to change a stream location - clicking
on the stream chooser button, takes focus out of it, thus prevents
device list from being shown)
It displays "front right"


2 - flat volumes are evil. It feels like a feature being removed. Now
changing a volume for a stream directly affects main volume, and alsa
volume through it.
I though that one of main PA features, was a volume control per stream.
Could you explain me what flat volumes are (I know that turning them off
fixes this issue)?


3 - PA sometimes dies, and it is impossible to make it log to a file,
other that writing a wrapper script. Wrapper script doesn't help much
ether, as new autostart feature, tries to launch many copies of PA, and
only one starts. This creates a lots of 'false positives'
I can disable autostart, but then, I need to write a tool to autostart
and restart it, maybe this is the right solution.
(syslog doesn't seem to be able to put an output of a daemon to a file.
of course I can grep the log files, but having a clean seperate log
files seems to be better.

And recently I did another update of alsa library, and PA.
Now controlling the sound via gstreamer (from gnome-volume-control, and
other places like applet, sound wheel) is broken, now
it works like that, first slider seems to work, but then it stops
updating the volume, untill I close and start mixer again, (or select a
different device from device list in gnome-volume-control, and back)
and it repeats


Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky