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

[Maxim Levitsky]

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 17:06 +0300, Maxim Levitsky 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)
> 
> 
> 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"
Small progress, this only happens with pulse backend of canberra, which
isn't used in 9.04, which explains why I see that bug now.
It is probably the canberra bug, maybe it doesn't tell pulse that sound
is mono? (I think that notify sounds are mono)



> 
> 
> 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)?

Just one issue though. If a stream is played at low volume, and I click
a button, a noise sound is emmited and it almost covers the notify
sound.
maybe this is a HW fault, or I suspect that PA reconfigures the played
sound to play at lower volume, and this gives that noise sound. Anyway
this is a bug.



> 
> 
> 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.
This will be futher investigated.

> 
> 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
And this one I fixed :-)
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> 	Maxim Levitsky
> 
> 
>