Re: [Usability] New Sound Preferences and Volume Control

[Maxim Levitsky <maximlevitsky gmail com>]

On Thu, 2008-12-25 at 18:27 -0500, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> 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.
Recording isn't perfect here, on board mic doesn't work, I found why,
but have no time to submit a patch (I told about this to alsa
developers, I told exactly what to do to fix this), but recording from
extrnal mic works fine.

> 
> > 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.
> 
I tried that, no this setup is very unstable.
(Still ether PA has to adopt to dmix, or alsa pa plugin should work in
all cases)


Maxim Levitsky