Simple GNOME user about PulseAudio

["Peteris Krisjanis" <pecisk gmail com>]

I have followed rather heated discussions in blog post comments and
mailing list archives about PulseAudio and GNOME and I must say I am
not impressed. Why?

There are many reasons why I think that PA is cool, but I also think
that somehow there is no way, no progression out of it and it's not
right way to solve GNOME audio problems. Also there is feeling in the
air that is some kinda committee decision, that some people have
decided it's cool and it _must_ be included in distros/GNOME/etc.

However, PA won't fix numerous problems with GNOME itself, and stuff
like device removal/insertion should be done by HAL/GVM/etc. Why
double efforts? Why not first fix what is broken? Maybe I am missing
here something?

Mine objections:
1. First and foremost - Pro card users (as I own one such myself and I
use it not only for pro means). PA is quite a disappointment in this
field, mostly including latency, and PA developers has only one answer
to that - we will take care about simple users first. I don't like
this answer, because I see pro card users as potential userbase
(thanks of lot of development in this field), and I don't want them to
be turn off from Linux just because their chosen distro suddenly lags
or sound doesn't work quite precise. Not every pro user uses and wants
to use JACK, so it's not argument.

2. Device addition/removal - just question - why this should be in PA?
Shouldn't it have to be handled in HAL/ALSA/GNOME level? Why not fix
device selection for ALSA and current GNOME Sound capplet?

3. Why not "fix" Gstreamer to handle esound stuff and fix it in that
level? It would require some small app, but everything else could be
done in Gstreamer level.

Resume:
I have nothing big against PA, but I think it's not the right tool for
solution and shouldn't be included as default in GNOME or distros for
now (power users still can install it). Instead, focus should be on
ALSA stuff first. Device detection, setting, etc. that should be
handled with kinda GVM for audio devices, I think.

Just my two user cents,
casual GNOME user for almost eight years,
Peter.