[pulseaudio-discuss] Server-side overrun notification

[Magnus Hjorth]

Hi David,

On 07/23/2013 09:57 AM, David Henningsson wrote:
> Unfortunately, this is not currently possible. I agree it would be 
> useful for clients to know if samples have been dropped.
>
> I guess the ideal thought is since that on overflows, the internal 
> timing in PulseAudio changes so that this should not happen again, so 
> this should not concern clients.

For throwaway recordings like a VoIP chat session or whatever then this 
makes perfect sense. But if you're digitizing a batch of vinyl LPs for 
example then your recording will be silently damaged and you may not 
notice it until much later. If you get notified of the overrun you can 
just restart the recording.

>
> However, what happens in practice is a different question :-)

I haven't seen this happen in the real world (except for the case where 
I forced it by suspending the PA process) but I would imagine it could 
happen either due to buggy drivers or scheduling problems under very 
high load. So it's a robustness issue mainly I would say.

Regards,
Magnus