[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio in general - does it make sense?

[Markus Rechberger]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Vadim Peretokin <vperetokin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Everyone has their viewpoint.
> Gaming in Ubuntu Karmic is quite an unpleasant experience due to the
> ALSA<->PA plugin making games die / have really stuttering sound. Nobody
> cares about it atm "until after the holidays", so I'm still waiting on that
> for a resolution...
> I have a USB headset, and no, the first time plugged in PA did nothing. I
> had to manually change the input and output streams to the USB headset to
> make my apps work. Worse than that, I'm not able to specify a default one -
> so for every new app, I have to set it to my headset. To make matters more
> fun, PA will reset (at some condition which I don't agree with and doesn't
> help my use case) to my onboard sound card.
> Oh and the new teamspeak 3 that just came out completely fails to work on
> ubuntu karmic. Just hogs all CPU and dies when you try to record any sound
> in it.
> But hey, on the bright side, recordmydesktop doesn't bork out with "someone
> is already using the sound card" problem.

I think Pulseaudio is still far away from being ready to use on a desktop.
I like the idea behind Pulseaudio, but it should be optional and not
default right now.
Of course the developers want to see it installed everywhere, and it
even has some
advantages (it would be really good if it would work just like it was
announced to be years
ago).
The current status of Pulseaudio:
* It has nice features
* It still has more bugs than Alsa has
* It limits the basic audio capabilities
* A very big problem for older distributions it is extremely unstable
(the unstableness is fixed nowadays but this is a real problem for
applications which are supposed with older distributions too)

If PA wants to continue like this it should have an easier update
mechanism, and try to make the update mechanism more independent from
the distributions. I'm fine if Colin and Lennard still want to push it
as long as they take care about it, if you can't handle it please
don't tell people to use it by default (personally my final resolution
for all issues was to remove pulseaudio, I think this is what noone
really wants, especially since you put alot work into it).
If someone complains about a bug why don't you provide a feature like
pulseaudio-update to switch to the latest pulseaudio version (the only
ones who regulary have the latest versions are you guys - not the
people who manage the distributions).

The current situation is not good, and something should be done.

Markus

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