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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 06.08.09 17:06, Maxim Levitsky (maximlevitsky at gmail.com) wrote:

> 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)

No clue. Multilib is a desaster. If you want this at all, use what
your distro provides you with.

> 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"

Hmm, is it possible that this is related to spacial events sounds?
i.e. if you trigger them on the right side of the screen they are
moved to your right speakers? If you trigger them on the left side of
the screen they are triggered on the left side? If that's the case,
then this is a feature, not a bug.

Otherwise, I have never heard of this bug. If you remove
~/.pulse/*stream-volumes.tdb and restart PA. Does that fix the issue?

> 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)?

The device volume is fixed to max of all the stream volumes. That's
all.

If you have one stream at -2dB, one at -1dB and one at -3dB then the
device volume will be fixed to -1dB. if you then scale the device
volume this will be reflected equally on the stream volumes. If you
change a stream volume this will only then affect the device volume if
it is the "loudest" one which you modify.

It's actually pretty easy. 

> 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.

Please set log-level=debug in daemon.conf and the debug output should
end up in syslog.

Which distribution is this? For tsched to work fine you need a *very*
recent kernel (i.e. as in "not released yet") which provides a fixed
snd_pcm_avail(). 

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506075
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501769

> 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

Sounds as if PA simply dies due to the mentioned snd_pcm_avail()
problems.

Also note that recent g-v-c does not user Gst anymore, but connects
directly to pa. Make sure to use that as Gst's mixer abstraction is
uh, less than awesome.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4