[pulseaudio-discuss] Master is frozen

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Fri, 2014-11-14 at 11:48 +0500, Alexander E. Patrakov wrote:
> 14.11.2014 11:07, Arun Raghavan wrote:
> > Hello,
> > As promised, master is now frozen. Please do not push anything other
> > than essential fixes. I'd like to have some stability testing of HSP
> > before rolling 6.0 RC1. Any help here is appreciated.
> 
> I would like to bring up again the topic of module-equalizer-sink.
> 
> A bit more than half a year ago, I proposed to remove it, because of 
> really really really broken DSP. See my criticisms here:
> 
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2014-March/020174.html
> 
> None of them were addressed since then. However, my viewpoint has also 
> changed.
> 
> Earlier, I proposed to suggest module-ladspa-sink + mbeq from 
> swh-plugins + veromix as a replacement. However, upon inspection 
> prompted on IRC by a user who tried to test it, it was found out that 
> mbeq is also buggy. It has wrong gain under the default settings, and 
> also doesn't try to ensure that the impulse response of the equalizer is 
> short enough to fit in the difference between the FFT size and the 
> window size. This leads to irregular artifacts with some players e.g. if 
> the lowest frequency slider is not set at nearly the same position as 
> the next one. Additionally, veromix is unmaintained. So, there is 
> currently no solution to the "system-wide equalizer" problem in linux.
> 
> I understand that Tanu has resistance to removing features without 
> replacement. Therefore, I don't propose removal (even though I should, 
> because there cannot be any real users of this broken "feature", 
> period).

Last time we discussed this, the module's original author said that he
uses the module all the time, so there's at least one real user, and I
wouldn't be surprised if there are more.

> What I propose is to add a notice to the ./configure output in 
> order to nag distributors who create false hope in users by including 
> this broken module, and create a warning on module load.

I'm fine with adding warnings. Patches welcome!

-- 
Tanu