Re: Simple GNOME user about PulseAudio

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Sat, 13.10.07 02:21, Peteris Krisjanis (pecisk gmail com) wrote:

Hi!

> 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.

That's not exactly hard technical data you're using as an argument
here. "it's not right way", "feeling in the air", ...

> However, PA won't fix numerous problems with GNOME itself, and stuff
> like device removal/insertion should be done by HAL/GVM/etc. Why

I tend to disagree. One example: In PA we have this nice module which
automatically combines (or like apple likes to call it: "aggregates")
all available audio hardware into a single virtual one, compensating
for sample rate deviations, and dealing with hot plugs and unplugs.
Now, I am not sure how you plan to implement something like this in
"HAL/GVM/etc"?

> double efforts? Why not first fix what is broken? Maybe I am missing
> here something?

Yes, you are. Neither HAL, nor GVM, nor "etc" touches audio data in
any way. So doing stuff like distributing audio onto multiple audio
devices does not make any sense in HAL, GVM, or "etc". 

> 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.

Didn't you notice? In GNOME we try to get things working smoothly and
easily for 99% of all people. The remaining 1% with those whopping pro
audio soundcards is never what we optimize for. For those who think
the options GNOME offers are too little, there's this other desktop,
called KDE.

So, you claim latency is sooooo important for you, that PA is too bad
for you, and on the other hand you don't like JACK? I wonder what kind
of special realtime-requiring audio stuff you are doing with your
card. 

> 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?

You don't seem to understand HAL that well. PA integrates with HAL to
get the hotplug events. That's the way HAL is supposed to be used.

> 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.

As mentioned Gst and PA are different beasts. GST is a shared library,
for media muxing/demuxing/coding/decoding. PA is a sound server with a
PCM API. Also Gst is not really suitable for apps that just want to
shove out some raw PCM audio data. 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net         ICQ# 11060553
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4