[pulseaudio-discuss] Alternate sample rates

[Arun Raghavan]

On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 03:38 -0400, Wang Xingchao wrote:
> 2011/10/18 Arun Raghavan <arun.raghavan at collabora.co.uk>:
> > Hello,
> > I just pushed a bunch of patches by Pierre Louis-Bossart to introduce an
> > on-by-default alternate-sample-rate to configuration in addition to
> > default-sample-rate. This was discussed earlier this year on list[1].
> > There's some more information on my blog[2].
> 
> Very Cool feature!  Why not change sample_spec totally according to
> sink's availability, but only sample rate? The default sample_spec
> used at initialization, if alsa driver supports various formats/rates,
>  PA could change sink's sample_spec in order to fit sink-input's
> request. Is there any risk or my misunderstanding ?

Just to add to what Pierre said, another thing to consider with these
patches is that unless we can switch sample rates at arbitrary times,
this patch allows some streams to "hog" the device at a particular
sample rate and format. You might not want a corked 96 kHz float32
stream holding your device at that format when a voip stream comes in
trying to do 8 kHz mono.

That is a pathological case, but until I'd prefer to solve for this sort
of behaviour (at least to the extent that corked streams don't block
rate updates) before considering arbitrary sample rate and format
changes.

Cheers,
Arun