I believe the universe I exist in is real, but how would I know for sure?
Anyway, I haven't had to google about a pulseaudio problem in at least a few years. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995. I've hated Linux audio for most of that time, and I've broken it in every possible way. But, today, my Fedora system has sound that Just Works. I don't know how it Just Works (though I know it's pulseaudio), because I haven't had to learn...because it Just Works. It works for Steam games, it works for browser audio, it works for system notifications, it works for movies, it even works for audio and music software. It's pretty weird.
Anyway, from what I can tell, the bugs, misfeatures, poorly thought out implementation, etc. all got worked out somewhere along the way. It took a long time. But, it did get fixed.
Have you actually used it in the past couple of years?
The main problem with PulseAudio is that it "just works" for the majority of users, but then it fails randomly, unpredictably, unrepeatably and with no indication of what is going wrong, and most of the time you get a "uh, works for me". This is a kind of experience that I was used to expect in Windows, not in Linux.
Just two more random examples:
RPi 3, audio would hang randomly when opening a new process using audio from another using audio. The solution would be to either play an audio sample from the command line to unclog the audio system, or uninstall PulseAudio.
Ubuntu 16.04. Rewinding the video while using mplayer could cause the audio to play at a faster rate. Again uninstalling PulseAudio would solve the problem.
yeah, future version of PA should had one command 'uninstall'; all linux users would use PA with joy now.
I often feared PA, and something in ALSA (I almost know zero about linux audio stack) made it a zero effort / 99% working thing that matched what I want for audio, that is a no sweat thing that just push sound. I can live without multi room networked audio, but having local audio crash randomly is too much a PITA. Feels like having lisp macros on top of VBA.
That said I wish we could find a better solution. Something between ALSA and PA. Also PA demands quality driver, IIRC Lennard told he cannot get blamed for that, it's a bit like GPUs in a way; and I wish we'd have open hardware audio chip that were simple and not lying.
I don't know why you're downvoted.
One thing though: if Lennard blames the drivers, he should at least implement some fallback mechanism to use when a feature is unavailable or can't be relied on to work reliably. Honestly, if with the same drivers ALSA works fine and PA doesn't, it's hard to blame the drivers.
I think it's a bit more subtle than that. PA asks more from the hardware to do more than ALSA (sampling capabilities, and latency), if the drivers report fake numbers to ALSA it might work fine for its limited use case, while it fucks PA logic entirely.
That said a default fallback would be so good. I can't stop thinking that LP writes things for his own world and leave it there when he's "satisfied" with it; even if it means shit for the rest. Which means the issue is that he shouldn't be in charge of socially impactful components.
> I can't stop thinking that LP writes things for his own world and leave it there when he's "satisfied" with it; even if it means shit for the rest. Which means the issue is that he shouldn't be in charge of socially impactful components.
Unless you have examples of solid patches fixing these kind of problems that he rejected, this is a significantly unfair statement.
Fair point, he's not the only coder in his projects, and maybe it's unfair social response that influence me, but his projects always rub people the wrong way, even though they carry brilliant useful ideas. Also if the overall design impede fixing without too much hassle ..
He seems to suffer from massive ego. He always assumes that if his stuff is failing, it’s somehow someone else’s fault, and refuses to acknowledge fault even when evidence is presented.
At least that’s what’s been apparent to me from the things that I’ve read by him and about him.
He often has a lot of good points, but it's not enough when assuming a pivotal role in society. You cannot just be right 60% of the time, because 40% people leftover is far too much. It's saddenning for instance, PA had valueable goals, but if the design assumes hardware that doesn't exist (exagerating) then it's not a good fit for a standard audio stack.
And I'm not sure it's really ego.. I'd rate him at about 0.07geohots.
I did try to use it and discovered that it's impossible to configure mpd to run as a system service and be able to play sound while also allowing desktop applications to play sound. I forget all the details, but the way I figured out how to get sound to do what I wanted was to enable alsa dmix and to pipe everything possible through dmix, using pulseaudio only for the one or two essential apps that insist on it.
Funny, I just did that yesterday. I was reconfiguring my mpd server and I saw it was configured to use alsa (which, incidentally broke my sound occasionally). I set it up to use Pulseaudio and now I can listen to mpd server while listening to deezer.com that runs through browser while making a skype call on the same machine (not that I'd want to do it, anyway).
Exactly. Does it support redirecting audio streams to another machine on the same network? That's a vital feature in our hackspace, where everyone can send audio to the room speakers via PA, and it's also used extensively in my living room (where the speakers are connected to the home server).
I don't know, but sending audio over a network sounds like the sort of use case that requires a sound server. Playing sound locally doesn't. Although, as I said elsewhere, I have mpd stream to icecast for playing my audio remotely so, in my case, I don't need pulseaudio for this: I imagine you could configure a similar setup where anyone on the local network can register with icecast as a "radio station" znd stream sound that way.
A workflow that enables network transparency by using a tool for radio stations might work for music, but not for anything with latency requirements. Imagine playing any video game with even a 100ms audio delay.
That's something that really bothers me about pulse: it looks like it should have a nice unixy design and work well, but actually using it is, in my experience, a complete potshot.
For me the important advance was redirecting an audio stream to a different device on my machine, as I wanted to happen when I plugged in my USB headset. Currently that works more smoothly on Linux for me than Windows.
When you log out of your desktop session, does mpd continue playing? I have mpd setup to stream via icecast so I can listen to my music remotely and the issue I was having was that when I logged out of my desktop, the music would stop playing because the sound server was tied to my desktop session.
I believe personal experience is anecdotal at best and not "the universe". My anecdotal experience with pulseaudio is that it simply does not like my setup (internal sound card + 4 external usb card + occasional hdmi sound transport) and having an occasional pop or crack on a 10kW PA system is not desirable.
I've read a pulseaudio guru post explaining that when you know what you are doing you can work out a pulseaudio config that reduce pulseaudio latency issues, real time resampling, drop outs and high cpu usage. Just don't use the default config.
internal sound card + 4 external usb card + occasional hdmi sound transport) and having an occasional pop or crack on a 10kW PA system is not desirable.
This is a common issue. It happens on Windows and Mac, as well. Am I to understand you don't experience it with some other way of handling sound (e.g. not using PulseAudio)? Are all of them being driven by the same program?
I DJ, and have used multiple independent interfaces in the past; there were frequently pops and warbles as the various timing crystals in the various interfaces fell out of sync and were forced back into sync by the software. It happened on both Windows and Linux (though it was slightly less pronounced on Linux, and I never figured out why). JACK might be the best way to deal with that problem on Linux, though I never tried it (I just switched to a dedicated DJ controller with multiple outs and headphone output).
But, it's a common enough problem that most DJ software has something about the problem in their FAQ.
As far as I know, Pulseaudio still hasn't fixed the four and a half year old bug which causes Bluetooth audio to get more and more out of sync until you reconnect: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58746
The one procedure I use to fix non-working sound on Linux consists of 1 - look at the package manager for pulse-audio; 2 - Uninstall it.
Works every single time. last time I did it was around March. (I still don't know how it creeps back into my computers.)
Last time pulse was creating problems for me I decided that since I was now writing an application that links to the sound system, let's stop linking to low level functions and use pulse abstractions that some people claim to be better.
Turns out that the pulse "abstractions" are basically verbatim copies of alsa. Just with some added badly documented options. Some with very descriptive names, other with cryptic ones, but whatever, no option seems to do exactly what its name implies. Besides, pulse abstracts away most of the flexibility of the sound hardware, so you can't use it, and well, every time I tried running something with it, I got an assertion failure on pulse code... Always with some completely non-descriptive description.
Anyway, I haven't had to google about a pulseaudio problem in at least a few years. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995. I've hated Linux audio for most of that time, and I've broken it in every possible way. But, today, my Fedora system has sound that Just Works. I don't know how it Just Works (though I know it's pulseaudio), because I haven't had to learn...because it Just Works. It works for Steam games, it works for browser audio, it works for system notifications, it works for movies, it even works for audio and music software. It's pretty weird.
Anyway, from what I can tell, the bugs, misfeatures, poorly thought out implementation, etc. all got worked out somewhere along the way. It took a long time. But, it did get fixed.
Have you actually used it in the past couple of years?