Re: [Usability] New Sound Preferences and Volume Control

[Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi gmail com>]

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 15:00 +0200, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
> First of all, I like the idea of pulseaudio, but currently it just
> doesn't work on any of my systems, and no skype isn't the only reason,
> but there are much more:
> 
> 1 - recording doesn't work at all, don't remember exactly what was
> broken, but it is broken.

Don't know if this is related, but some codecs have just plain broken
recording.

> Lastly, I have a question, what it the ulitimate goal of PA?
> Will it be the only sound interface to be accessed directly when there
> is need to do PCM playback/recording, and complex format decoders like
> gstreamer will talk directly to PA, or there be yet another abstraction
> (I have heard about libcanabera, or so

Yes, I think it's meant to get rid of all the "is it an ALSA or OSS
app?" junk and just have one unified interface for all sound in GTK
apps.  KDE uses Phonon.

By the way, for Skype, you might be able to set up ALSA to use dmix so
that ALSA mixes Skype's direct-ALSA output with PulseAudio.  Neither
will have an exclusive lock on the audio device to block the other then.

-- 
Mackenzie