[pulseaudio-discuss] Conception of PulseAudio in public through Debian

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Sonntag, 15. April 2012 schrieb Martin Steigerwald:
> Am Samstag, 14. April 2012 schrieb Sean McNamara:
> > On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Paul Menzel
> 
> Hi Sean and Paul, hi everyone,
> 
> > <paulepanter at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> > > Dear PulseAudio and Debian folks,
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I am aware that is not an upstream issues per se, but indirectly it
> > > is as written above, so I hope it is alright to post this message
> > > here on the list.
> > > 
> > > Although during the last years PulseAudio is doing its job pretty
> > > well, there are still quite some people out there thinking it is a
> > > mess. And indeed looking at the Debian bug tracking system [1] a
> > > lot of bugs are reported there. There are 145 reports [2] most of
> > > them concerning upstream things. Since for a long time, Debian did
> > > not package the latest PulseAudio version, I guess a lot of them
> > > are fixed already.
> > > 
> > > Debian’s large user base experienced a lot of these problems and
> > > therefore disabled PulseAudio and have not tried newer versions.
> > 
> > Their loss. There's really nothing wrong with pulseaudio, unless you
> > have specific hardware for which the ALSA drivers are still broken. I
> > don't think we should try to actively do anything to improve
> > pulseaudio's image; we're not a corporation and we don't do
> > marketing. The software and its usefulness stands on its own: if
> > people either
> 
> […]
> 
> As one of these debian users I have a different oppinion - solely on my
> user experience and not any technical considerations. I reported some
> issues but then - as I admit, lost the patience to take the time to
> follow through. I still use Pulseaudio on one machine regularily, but
> I disabled it on my Amarok playback machine at home, cause I feared
> that just following through my initial bug reports by providing
> information and testing that help Pulseaudio developers to fix the
> issues would take me to long time. And for what gain? Currently in my
> perception it is win for me having removed Pulseaudio again on this
> machine, it would be loss for me keeping it.
> 
> Situation with Pulseaudio on this machine in brief:
> 
> 1) USB sound card not detected after resume or on boot sometimes:
> usb_set_interface failed log spams. I usually unplugged and replugged
> it till it worked. I report this as I think issue 828 on the trac bug
> tracker at that time - that I found quite cumbersome to use, glad to
> read that it is freedesktop bug tracker now. Lennart asked me for some
> more information. But it sounded quite complex and I was scared off.

This was:

926: usb soundcard does not work reliably in pulseaudio, but works 
otherwise

on that trac instance.

> 2) Pulseaudio does not initialize volume correctly on that Sonica
> Theater USB soundcard cause it has more channels than Pulseaudio
> supports. I reported it here as:
> 
> usb sound card: PCM has 8 channels, thats too much & cannot submit
> datapipe for urb 0
> 
> But admittedly didn´t follow-through.

I now reported this as:

Bug 48730 - pulseaudio does not set volume on left channel correctly with 
Sonica Theater USB sound card
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/48730

> On my work machine - a Thinkpad T520 - that seems to be easily capable
> of stutterfree playback with Pulseaudio I installed Pulseaudio
> systemwide. And then have
> 
> martin at merkaba:~> ps aux | grep pulse | grep -v grep
> pulse     1073  0.0  0.0 230828  3700 ?        S<l  Apr14   0:00
> /usr/bin/pulseaudio --system --daemonize --high-priority --log-
> target=syslog --disallow-module-loading=0
> martin    2330  0.0  0.0 235048  5616 ?        Sl   Apr14   0:42
> /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start
> 
> everytime I forgot to "exit 0" the start shell scripts on a Pulseaudio
> upgrade. I think I may be able to add a dpkg diversion or something
> like this. But I believe as a user I shouldn´t have to be doing this.
> 
> I now reported a bug for that after I didn´t find one in the current
> bug list:
> 
> Bug 48728 - starts systemwide and sessionwide Pulseaudio daemons in
> system wide mode
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48728

My initial post about this was:

[pulseaudio-discuss] using pulseaudio with simultaneous playback from 
mutiple X sessions

So I think one hour is over now.

Thats enough constructivelyness for now.

Now taking my bath with non pulseaudio played back music from my T23 ;)

Thanks,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7