[pulseaudio-discuss] Ubuntu Hardy, Pulseaudio and Jack

[Patrick Shirkey]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Sun, 24.05.09 00:57, rosea grammostola (rosea.grammostola at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>   
>> Ok so not running both at the same time. But how do you stop pulseaudio from
>> running and restart it after you used JACK?
>>     
>
> Newer PA and JACK versions cooperate in this way
> automatically. If you fire up JACK PA will go out of the way for that
> device. And after JACK is done PA takes the device back. JACK is king
> and PA will comply.
>
> In older versions you can use a tool like "pasuspender". It will
> suspend PA's access to the audio devices temporarily as long as child
> process is running. If you make that child process JACK you have a
> neat way to make JACK and PA not fight for device access.
>
> A more brutal way is to stop PA with "pulseaudio -k" before you run
> JACK and then start PA with "pulseaudio -D" afterwards. But that
> probably won't work that nicely since PA is configured to autospawn in
> most cases these days -- which you can disable however by editing
> client.conf.
>
>   

Hi,

- It's very cool that PA is now able to auto configure itself to cede 
control of the default device when JACK is started. Do you know which 
version of jack this works with as I would like to run some tests? jackd 
(1.0), jack2 (jackdmp), jackdbus (jack2 with dbus), jackvideo (jackd 
with video frame support)...

- I would love to see an addition to pavucontroller which allows the 
user to choose to auto connect to JACK and remember which jack ports PA 
were connected between sessions.

=======================================================
Additional comments in support of adding auto connect functionality to PA.
=======================================================

I see no reason to disable PA when jack is running, Instead it would be 
more effective and user friendly to automatically route PA to JACK 
master i/o. If someone is running PA and does not explicitly configure 
it to be disabled when jack is running they actually do want to hear 
desktop sounds through jack. I think it should not be forced by PA that 
they cannot hear PA streams but instead left to the user to choose as an 
easily accessible config option. All the functionality is in place now 
except for the auto connect and applet config option/s.

- In JACK the desktop sound will not be recorded unless the master 
output is directed to the recorded track.

- If a user does not want to hear desktop sounds in a mix they can 
temporarily mute pulse.

- If a user wants to turn off desktop sounds they can either disable 
them as a config option for the desktop manager (gnome/kde/...) or not 
run PA at all.

- Currently the user is hard pressed to get PA streams into jack at all 
and even the users with several years experience are finding this 
process to be a battle which in the end only makes them feel negative 
towards PA and in turn remove it completely from their systems and bad 
mouth your work it at every opportunity.

- I have been using both methods described above with so far little 
success. Granted I am using Fedora 10 and not the latest version of PA 
but there is not much easily accessible information online that is 
verified proven to work. There isn't even a reference to the wiki page 
in the FAQ.  Running PA with JACK is definitely a FAQ on the LAU list.




Cheers.



--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.