Re: Pulseaudio

["Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro" <gjc inescporto pt>]

On Ter, 2007-10-09 at 09:49 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On 10/9/07, Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro <gjc inescporto pt> wrote:
> >
> > I am not saying Pulse Audio has these problems.  I simply don't know
> 
> That can easily be helped. Just try gnome 2.20 with pulseaudio in Fedora 8.
> It works beautifully.

I just tried pulseaudio 0.9.6 on Ubuntu Gutsy, and:

  - Audio stuttering increased dramatically.  Most of the time, when I
hide/show the rhythmbox window, or when I switch to another workspace
(metacity), I hear a very annoying gap in audio.  The same thing with
ALSA direct hardware access works perfectly with no audio gap;

  - I noticed when trying to switch RB back to use direct ALSA that the
pulse audio server is still using the annoying behaviour of locking the
sound device.  I had to do "killall pulseaudio" before I could switch
back to direct ALSA sound.


> And once you tried, you don't have to spread FUD anymore...

I tried and I'm still not convinced.  Unless there are some special
kernel patches in fedora making a big difference, I still hate sound
routed through a userspace daemon.  I would willingly tolerate it for
sound coming from network applications, but it's not a price I want to
pay for simple local applications when I don't care about PNP or network
sound.

IMHO Pulse Audio developers are just being stubborn; I have not yet any
good reason why PA and direct ALSA access cannot get along.

I'm sorry for being the bad guy here, but someone has to say these
things...

-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
INESC Porto, Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit
"The universe is always one step beyond logic." -- Frank Herbert