Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."
You should be using OSS4. I put up with the Pulse idiosyncracies until my virtual machines spazzed out. Started researching my options, and found that Open Sound was moving past the deprecated OSS3, which wasn't much better than Pulse.
Since I've compiled and installed Open Sound, I have no more sound problems, period. Everything works the way it's supposed to.
If Pulse and Alsa get their shit together, fine. If not, I'm a devoted OSS fan. Before anyone runs off to experiment, be warned - you will probably have to spend a few minutes purging Alsa from your system. There is no co-existence of the two, at least not on Ubuntu. If you're not a Linux guru, plan on following a how-to, and plan on spending a couple hours getting it right.
I'm an OSSv4 converted too - being being unable to get vmix or Pulse to work right, Alsa could turn the volume as high as Windows. Now in OSSv4 everything works fine, except being unable to detect the jack, which is annoying.
Turning the volume louder than the total of 0db demolishes your speakers, unless you have mid, high and lows.
And even if it doesn't actually damage anything, amplification can cause clipping [wikipedia.org]. On the other hand, many sources really are too quiet and don't fully exploit the available dynamic range, so having a way to increase sound volume up to the point where you'd start overdriving the hardware would be nice. But that appears to be beyond the state of the art for online algorithms. (Offline, people have been normalizing volume for years.)
All these informed-sounding folks, living in some perfect netherworld that doesn't really exist. *sigh*
If I have a recording that is too quiet (for whatever reason), it is reasonable to be able to turn it up so that it's not too quiet anymore.
Not every recording is stuffed all the way up to the max at 0dB [wikipedia.org]. Some are far quieter, whether on purpose or on accident. If I have a recording which peaks at -20dB, then I ought to be able to apply at LEAST 20dB of gain to it without jumping through hoops.
This is not an uncommon problem, and the best (simplest) solution is just to turn it up -- however that's done. It's been awhile since I've done any serious audio in Linux, but if PulseAudio or ALSA or whatever combination thereof requires me to buy extra hardware (WTF?) to achieve this very simple and obvious function, then it is very broken[1] indeed.
And before anyone replies and says "Oh noes! If we give the users gain, they might makes teh Distortions!!!!" This is broken in the "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that" sense. It's REALLY fucking stupid that the same operating system which allows you to do "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" without prompting WILL NOT PROVIDE MEANINGFUL AUDIO GAIN.
When an application can make the soundsystem stop working for all other applications, than there is a bug in the soundsystem, not just the application that caused the problem.
Precisely. PulseAudio cost me a week of effort in building my media playing machine. An entire week of trying to figure out why XBMC and Boxee wouldn't talk to the sound card.
As soon as I got rid of PulseAudio? It started working.
When an API is supposedly compatible with something it is replacing, it is the _API's_ fault when an application stops working, not the application. We already had this argument with EXT4.
Same here, yesterday I spent 4 hours on a media PC I built and configured for my brother in law, up to the point that everything worked at my place using SPDIF output (which already cost me 2 hours to get working in the first place). I arrive at his place, turns out he wants to use the HDMI output instead of the SPDIF. No problem, you'd guess, just go to the sound preferences and select HDMI, right? Not on linux you don;t and not with PulseAudio apparently. After dicking around with the 4 different mixers (gnome, alsmixer, pulseaudio) and 4 layers of configuration (gnome sound settings, pulseaudio settings, alsa settings, gstreamer settings) it turned out that I had to put a file called.asoundrc with some cryptic content in my home directory, and in some tab called 'switches' in the PulseAudio advanced settings had to check 4 boxes that did something with an 'iec958' (whatever that may be) and then, finally, it worked. Not very well by the way because the Ubuntu startup sound pops and stutters like hell, but after that it's more or less 'ok'.
I've been using Linux for over 10 years now and I've been telling people over and over again how even your grandma could use it, but sadly, I have to conclude that in some ways it still sucks balls for people who don't like fiddling around with obscure settings, configuration files, 4 layers of sound settings etc. I really love linux myself but let's face it, for example sound and wireless (damn wpasupplicant and 'wlan0: link not ready) are still lightyears behind Windows and (even more so) OS X in terms of usability.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday October 19, @03:59AM (#29791333)
Big deal. Scratch your itch! Check out the code from CVS and contribute a fix. Don't just sit there and complain, do something about it! This is F/OSS for God's sake.
I think you're joking up until this point...
How many people would contribute fixes to Microsoft's buggy audio drivers if they had half a chance?
... and now I think you are serious. Not everyone that uses Linux is a software developer. Not to mention, of course, that not all software developers who use Linux would have the time/skillset to approach such a focused project.
Big deal. Scratch your itch! Check out the code from CVS and contribute a fix. Don't just sit there and complain, do something about it! This is F/OSS for God's sake. How many people would contribute fixes to Microsoft's buggy audio drivers if they had half a chance?
Bah! As a computer user I do not have time to do that. The previous to last version of Linux I tried had this "ALSA" sound driver, which was *almost* behaving OK. Then the last version had this "PulseAudio" sound driver which was completely broken. My 10 years old Windows XP operating systems gives me no problems when playing audio.
I put the blame in Distribution makers, who added PulseAudio to "production-ready" distributions when the software is clearly in Alpha stages.
ALSA is on the other hand in BETA stage IMHO. Still, it was good enough.
I'm also slightly disturbed by his attitude to other operating systems than just Linux. For example, this post [mail-archive.com] on the OpenSolaris mailing list.
Comments such as the following:
Then, "Unix Admin" asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called "Fedora", and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat.
As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with "Slow" and ends with "aris".;-)
appear somewhat unprofessional for someone who is being paid for the development he is doing, and for someone on whom the future of Unix/Linux audio has been entrusted.
most of the time, however, the issue is there only with pulseaudio. my machine works like a charm without it and stutter with - the developer will have an hard time convincing me that the bug is not in his software, as alsa and arts had never had a problem previously.
I'll stick my neck out here. First, Pulse relies on the Alsa driver. There is no hardware issue, and the driver issue seems to be the Alsa driver. OSS4 works on my hardware, where Pulse and Alsa failed. And, of course, the Windows sound drivers work on that same hardware.
People with sound issues on Alsa and Pulse should try OSS4.
The idea is great. PulseAudio is an excellent solution for networked audio and thin unix clients. Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless. No matter how close to bug-free it is, it is an unneeded source of bugs in that case.
Now if only it would actually play music without skipping, freezing, or using 30+ percent of the CPU. Sheesh!
It will, if both your kernel and Pulseaudio are properly configured for low-latency desktop usage (realtime privileges, 1000hz timer, etc). While I fully understand you being annoyed that your current distro/version ships with a default configuration that isn't fully adjusted to this very common usage pattern, it also means that the situation will get better as distributions learn how to properly integrate Pulseaudio and the remaining bugs in Pulseaudio itself are fixed and it gets better at automatically detecting and adjusting to different hardware setups. This includes making the ALSA drivers better at reporting which jacks are plugged in and things like that.
OSS3 was proprietary, it had limitations, and it sucked.
In today's world, OSS4 is open source, it is actively being developed, and it WORKS! See my post above. I can have three virtual machines open, all of them playing sound, and go back to the host machine, and play music there. No sizzle, no popping, no waiting for buffers.
OSS4. I don't understand why more people haven't discovered it yet. If the idea of compiling scares you, don't mess with it - but I really thought the majority of Linux systems could figure it out.
> First, Bluetooth audio _sucks_ without PulseAudio....which means that all of us without "bluetooth audio" couldn't care less.
> Second, you NEED to have a sound daemon to properly manage the sound system and other sound daemons suck.
No you don't. No they don't.
For the mundane user, ALSA was doing fine before Pulse came along. For most of us, PulseAudio was a solution in search of a problem and just something else with more moving parts to break. Even now, most users would be best served by just un-installing PulseAudio entirely.
So we should forgive what is to most people a shitty application its sins because it solves a problem the majority of people don't give a crap about?
Thats the underlying problem here - the creator may indeed be correct when he says that 'such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people', but those people are outweighed by the non-technical masses suffering a bad experience.
Uhm. No, it doesn't. The first floating point exception will ruin your whole day.
The kernel has exception handling tables. This is used for a variety of things, primarily access to user space memory. My day is not ruined.
Of course, I'd rather just disable FPU exceptions.
Why would you imagine the kernel includes functions to enable FPU access? You think they would exist but not actually work? Sorry, they work quite nicely.
FYI, I actually write kernel code. It pays well.
"The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care."
Again, no. You need support from the userspace for Bluetooth.
No. Look, I could eliminate userspace entirely if I wanted to. (it's just a trivial change to not exec init) I can throw pretty much anything into the kernel. The kernel rules all.
"Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance."
Wrong. Kernel threads are not any different from the userspace threads.
Um??? They sure are, and I'm not limited to threads. I can use tasklets, softirqs, regular old interrupt handlers, or my own evil invention. I can even disable interrupts if I please.
"I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server."
Wrong, as usual. PulseAudio does not depend on the X-server and you can use SELinux just fine. In fact, PulseAudio works under a non-privileged account, so a flaw somewhere in the mixer code won't give the attacker the instant system-level access.
I didn't suggest it required the X server. I said it was the same sort of thing. It's a userspace program that is unable to create hooks for SE Linux policy or get capability bit allocations. Sure, I can use SE Linux as a big hammer, but I can't ask SE Linux to control the internals of non-kernel code.
I'm afraid you haven't yet distinguished between OSS3 and OSS4. Have you TRIED IT? If not - stop your belly aching. If you have tried it, then put some comments on the OSS4 contributor's site. Since I'm not a developer, telling me how bad it is accomplishes nothing.
Once again, OSS4 solves all of my problems. Sound just works for me, without a hitch.
Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless.
In fact it's worse than useless (on Ubuntu): whenever I move away from my wireless access point at home (i.e. I'm on my bike on my way to the university), my sound stutters; this is probably PulseAudio spending too much time on making a new map of the network and too little time on actually handling sound waves (but I'm speculating).
Did no one test this? Am I the only person using a "ThinkPod" as a portable music player? Oh, I guess it's not one of those 95% most common use cases, so it's no biggie if it isn't handled properly.
Except that there are twenty disjoint chunks of 5% least common use cases not being fixed because they don't affect that many people, except everyone is affected by one... grr... </hyperbole> <apology/>
desktop ~ #/etc/init.d/pulseaudio start * Please don't use system wide PulseAudio unless you read the * documentation available at http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/WhatIsWrongWithSystemMode [pulseaudio.org] * * When you're done, please set the variable PULSEAUDIO_SHOULD_NOT_GO_SYSTEMWIDE in */etc/conf.d/pulseaudio . Please remember that upstream does not support this mode * when used for standard desktop configurations. * ERROR: pulseaudio failed to start
Quoted from that link: "The maintainer's interest in making sure system mode is well supported is rather minimal."
If we make PA expect more correct behaviour from the apps, or that applications stop making particular assumptions about the audio stack, we need to fix the applications at the same time.
This is not entirely true.
Now, I don't know what the exact bugs are that are causing problems. But the API should be stable no matter what happens to the outside. There should be no way to destabilize or crash the audio layer from a usermode application. So, if by "expect more correct behavior from the apps" he means "garbage in, garbage out", then that's fine. But if by "expect more correct behavior from the apps" he means "no error checking and if any app screws up then everything melts", then that's not fine.
I don't know which he means, but I've seen instances of both.
It's actually extremely difficult to do a reliable sound system. The drivers for a large number of cards are pretty bad.
From what I understand up until recently most OS' treated sound cards like any other hardware. If you got a bad response from them, the OS would halt the system rather than risk physical damage. Hence sound cards are one of the leading causes of blue screens in windows 9x and XP.
One of the things Vista did right was recognise that drivers for sound cards can't be trusted and put in an additional software layer between the hardware and drivers to minimise sound card related blue screens. It's why Directsound has been removed from DX and one of the biggest reasons DX10 can't run on XP.
A correction here is that DirectSound has not been removed, it is still a major API. What has been removed is hardware acceleration of DirectSound. In Vista/7 all DirectSound audio is software processed. The soundcard can't accelerate any of it.
The real problem was actually that there were few hardware sound accelerators on the market. Most cards were (and are today) little more than buffers you could write data in to to be played. Ok, fair enough. However what happened was that the people who made these cards wanted to support all the nifty hardware features since games made use of them. So they'd write these big complex drivers that played make believe and pretended to do hardware acceleration, all in the kernel of course. That is where the problems happened.
So in NT 6 (Vista and 7) that was removed. All audio is handled in software, and the interface to hardware is just one of giving out the finished sound to be played. Much less room for problems, though more computationally intensive. Not a problem though since processors are much faster.
Hardware acceleration now can only be done using other APIs. That is how Creative Labs does it. They implement OpenAL (their own API) on their cards in parallel to the Windows APIs. It talks straight to the card, bypassing Windows's processing.
That's not the only big usermode DirectX related change though, the graphics subsystem was moved in to user mode too. Though this still does hardware acceleration, of course, the drivers were all moved up to user space. One side effect of this that you notice is that when you install new drivers, you don't need to reboot.
While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications.
Well, the way I see it, I can either use alsa and have (as far as I can tell) no bugs, or I can use PulseAudio and have more features and more bugs.
That might not be PulseAudio's fault, but it still means that if I use PulseAudio I will have a buggy sound system. Why do I want that? Why do I want it even if it's only buggy until all the applications get fixed?
Also, the promise of networked sound is kinda... meh... maybe I'd be happy if all my laptop sound got moved to my desktop box (which is connected to my stereo) automatically whenever my laptop is connected to my home access point (and, conversely, my desktop's sound automatically gets routed to my laptop whenever my laptop does an ssh home and is not around my home access point). But as far as I can tell, this is a bitch to set up, and I'm really not inclined to go clicking around some unintuitive menu system to set my sound up right every time I leave home or go back.
The largest problem with Linux audio is not really any particular driver model / sound server. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio and Jack all work when set up properly, with supporting hardware, and supporting software. But it's never a given that a particular app will support whatever you're using, or give you the choice to select your output device if you have multiple sound cards.
I've been running Ubuntu for a long time now, and recently installed Windows as a dual boot for making music. Why? I can spend X hours on setting stuff up, or I can spend X hours on making music. I can simply count on any app that matters supporting ASIO or DirectSound on Windows.
While I actively try to convert people to Ubuntu for regular desktop apps I still tell people who plan to do audio/video stuff to go for Windows/OS X. While it's totally doable to set up a working environment in Linux if you know what you want and which apps you want, I like to play with stuff for fun. I'd rather invest my time in having fun creating content than trying to get stuff to work.
(And yes, I've tried Ubuntu Studio. Nice, but not there yet for me.)
I've read in several places that the main problem with PulseAudio is not its design and implementation, but its instantiation. Many distributions apparently do not properly set up PulseAudio, causing it to behave unexpectedly. I found this to be the case with Ubuntu 9.04. PulseAudio worked like crap until I followed the following directions to get it set up. It's been working like a dream ever since:
I disagree with the original article [blogspot.com]: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA....any better ideas?
While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications.
Even if he may be 100% right about that: way not to get the point!
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is. Especially if it appears the same "problems" have been solved satisfactorily at least 10 years ago on every other OS in mainstream use.
In the meantime, Linux has changed both the audio driver model (ALSA, OSS, who knows what else), and in addition to that, the "application interfaces" (arts, esd, PulseAudio, etc.) so frequently, that it is hardly any wonder that application developers are taking the piss and not updating their software to match the bugs/workarounds to whatever the current "flavor of the week" API for audio interfacing is.
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem, so if things used to work before, and now they don't, of course you're going to blame PulseAudio. Even if it is not by itself the "real" culprit.
The problems started with ESD or esound, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon. Prior to that, sound daemons were unusual. Nobody actually ran one. Enlightenment (the insane game-inspired window manager) got one, GNOME briefly used Enlightenment, and we've been stuck with sound daemons ever since.
The OSS to ALSA transition was the other botch. It used to be that an app just did open() on/dev/audio or/dev/dsp and made sound. Any competant UNIX programmer could handle that. Now we have a kernel API that is essentially unusable, so you have to use ALSA libraries to do anything. Actually, those are **barely** usable.
Really, it wasn't always like this. My 486 DX4-75 with 8 MB RAM (slackware, fvwm-1.x) could handle audio. Back then, programmers didn't fuck around adding bugs and bloat. They wrote stuff that worked, nice and solid, on the hardware that we had.
One problem that many forget looking back on the "good old days" of sound is that you couldn't get sound from more than one thing. On single task OSes like DOS this wasn't a problem, you only ran one app. However for multi-tasking OSes it meant that whatever opened the soundcard first had control until it gave it up. This was problematic for many reasons. Meant that you couldn't even do something simple like play an alert sound from the OS if someone was playing MP3s (not such a problem in the 486 days since those were hard pressed to decode MP3s in realtime).
Well, that's where sound daemons come in. The OS mixes sounds from multiple apps and sends it to the soundcard. Thus you can have multiple programs using sound, just like video. What's more, it'll let you do things like control the volume if an app neglects a volume control. Firefox doesn't seem to have a volume control, but the Windows 7 mixer has no problem adjusting its volume, independent of the system.
There is no reason why this should be a problem. Windows and OS-X do it just fine. There is a sound layer the OS has that you write drivers for an all apps can interface with. You can extend/bypass that with your own APIs if needed (like OpenAL or ASIO). It works really well. For that matter on Windows now they have created the concept of Universal Audio Architecture which is a standard way for devices to expose their functions to Windows, and thus work without device specific drivers.
There is no reason Linux can't do this as well. You can have an audio daemon, and should. What need to happen is time send to be spent designing things in an intelligent way first, and then implement them so that they don't change all the time. Have a standard ABI that the driver writers develop for, and a standard API(s) that the software developers write for. Have standard mechanisms for people to add to or override that if needed.
It'll work fine, if designed well, implemented well, and not fucked with. You can't change the spec every other week. It needs to be laid out and stuck with.
This isn't theoretical, as I said OS-X and Windows do it, and have been doing it for some time.
I never thought I'd see a Linux advocate use the Vista Defense! It's the drivers, it's the software, it's something, but it's not my code!
At least with Vista the problems with video drivers, and various other hardware devices was sorted out within a couple of months. In Linux the way audio is handled is an absolute mess.
A lot of the problems with Pulseaudio are caused by the misconfiguration of Ubuntu's default kernel. It seems that they will be making the upcoming Karmic Koala even worse, according to a small rant on Lennart's blog [0pointer.de] today.
Sometimes mplayer will have sound, and totem will not, and other times, the opposite is true. Since the switch to pulseaudio, I have never seen a time when they both worked. Just a half hour ago there was no sound in miro. The volume slider in miro was turned up, the system volume was turned up, and my speaker volume was turned up. When I right clicked on my sound icon, went to preferences, and flipped to the "applications" tab, I found yet another volume slider labeled "miro" that was turned all the way down.
A few months ago I bought new speakers and a new sound card because my sound stopped working. The new hardware still didn't work, and a few days later, I found some random profile or device or something that was muted, but to even see that menu I had to change the default device in some gui I had never seed before, and then change it back. Starting about a month ago, whenever I play a youtube video, sound will not work for anything but flash (even after I close firefox) until I killall npviewer.bin
For some reason, when "surround" is muted on my laptop, my headphones don't work, but everything else does like normal, and if PCM gets muted, I will only get sound back if I turn the volume all the way down for a second, then turn it back up. Also, my USB headphones and USB speakers have never worked in linux.
The new surprises with every upgrade is also pretty fun. It used to be that I could just do a killall "pulseaudio" then/etc/init.d/alsasound restart, and everything would be back to the old way of working, but recently it just breaks everything even worse, requiring a reboot to fix. I'm hoping that a clean wipe of everything, and installation of ubuntu 9.10 may magically fix some of these random idiosyncrasies, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
I've had three systems with audio problems. Two Ubuntu-based (8.04, 9.04), a third OpenSuSE-based. All with PulseAudio. All had oddities- ranging from the sound working only during X session startup/shutdown (and not in-between), through to the audio skipping, repeatedly, when changing the current desktop. These were on reasonably decent machines, by the way. Machines that should gobble up and spit this data so fast that it barely dents CPU usage.
In each case, disabling PulseAudio and using, well, anything else, caused the problem to go away. OSS, ALSA, didn't matter, they both worked. Sometimes it was easy to remove PulseAudio, and sometimes it took a bit of work. Ubuntu 9.04 was a challenge. No, scratch that, it was a fight.
I look around, I see horror stories and widespread problems with PulseAudio.
I see claims that it works, if you configure it "properly". You know, I heard the same vague defence regarding Windows' instability. I didn't believe it for Windows either.
I've heard that PulseAudio has a great set of features. However, I have no interest in digging into what these features might be. The core feature that I want above all else isn't supported by PulseAudio. That feature?
Playing seamless audio.
PulseAudio can't even get that right. Stutters and skips are the norm, audio systems that worked previously no longer do, and the backers of this abomination are in abject denial about it. There are widespread complaints about it across multiple applications and multiple operating systems, and still it "isn't configured properly". You can't be serious. Complaints about PulseAudio are not really shared by the majority of technical people? Oh, yes they are.
If you want to provide a reasonable sound system, a *core* focus has to be on providing a working sound system. Get the core functionality right, then move onto features. Stability, correctness. Get the basics right. Also understand that API users may stuff things up, and falling over and dying is not the correct thing to do. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, not fragile.
PulseAudio did *not* do this. Any of this.
The order of the day seems to be to blame everything *but* PulseAudio. The apps are broken, the drivers are broken, the operating system maintainers didn't integrate it properly, it's not configured properly for the user's machine, the people complaining wouldn't be complaining if they were more technical, a lot of distros have adopted it so it must be good. Did I miss anything here? This has been the argument thus far.
I'm going to be different. I'm not going to blame the developers, the applications, the users, the knowledge of the users, the operating system developers, or anyone else. I'm going to blame the one at fault, the *cause* of these problems. The one thing in common with this incredible list of problems.
PulseAudio is completely and utterly broken- in design, in implementation, and in application. It is horrendous, shameful, and embarrassing.
OSS was deprecated because 4front pulled the rug out from under users and started demanding money for binary-only versions, and it was easier to write an entire API from scratch instead of trying to fix the crap they'd left in the kernel.
The 4Front interpretation of GPLv2 is irrelevant - the source code is triple-licensed under GPLv2, CDDL and BSD licenses. ALSA is an excellent example of Linux throwing away a solid API and implementation that could have evolved to support the few critical features it lacked (which is exactly what happened in FreeBSD for example) in favour of a half-baked alternative. The original ALSA API is poorly designed by people who clearly have very limited knowledge of OO principles, but wanted to apply them all the same. This piss poor API was never well documented, and the actual audio drivers are not of the same quality as the ones in OSSv4. The ALSA developers answer to the poor API? Slap another, equally poor, equally undocumented API on top of it. What a fucking mess.
Do more than.0001% of linux users need autoforwarding, or network transparency at all? Or should we focus on what the other 99.9999% want, which is high performance, low latency, non-crashing sound like the other two major OSs have.
A lot of devices stream data over a network and play it locally as audio. That does not necessarily make any of them a "network based" audio device in the sense that they can be driven by PA.
Audio is not unique in needing device ACLs adjusted; it should not need a unique solution for doing that. In fact, having an audio server handle ACL adjustments when something else does that is a violation of the Unix philosophy of chaining together simple tools that focus on one thing.
Application-controlled latency is good. Library-enforced latency is bad. Sending audio from one user-space process to another is a case of the latter.
After reading your post made "as a PA developer", I'm even more down on it than before.
And as I said, most applications seem to have this built in concept of "latency == bad", which is just bogus in most cases (media players etc.). If power consumption is the main factor (and with handhelds, laptops, netbooks and the like, it frequently *is*), then latency == good. Fewer CPU wakeups, longer battery life. Intel and others have been experimenting with large latencies of about 10-20 seconds with good results on power savings.
latency sucks... If I play a note on my guitar or keyboard, then I do not want to hear the sound more than a couple of milliseconds late... this is precisely why I still do my music recording on a windows box... I still can't get rid of it much as I really want to... I did have a perfectly good Ubuntu Studio setup going back on the LTS (Dapper Drake) before the current one, but certain issues pushed me into upgrading to the next LTS (Hardy Heron) and boom... pulseaudio screwed it all up... I was completely dumbfounded when I discovered it was an experimental sound system just dumped into the LTS without any attempt to get the default settings correct. I expect the LTS version of Ubuntu to actually work out of the box. So as a result, I got my XP box out of mothballs and went back to using XP for recording.
No its not. Video playback with an audio lag of several seconds? Not good.
You're confusing synchronization and latency. There's no particular reason you can't buffer up a few seconds of audio, yet make sure that audio is played exactly when the video calls for it.
The problem is that the implementation sucks, and that bugs are being ignored.
No, the problem is that the implementation sucked. Past tense. There were various CPU-eating problems. They were fixed a long time ago.
Really, the entire Linux sound system sucks. PulseAudio is one of the better parts of it. But because PulseAudio is visible, and because an old distribution once shipped with a CPU-eating PulseAudio, it makes the perfect scapegoat today.
This is the Sound of (Score:5, Funny)
Firrrrrsssst P Po Po sssst
Who knew? (Score:5, Funny)
Lady Gaga apparently uses Linux.
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Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Funny)
This is the only situation that anyone says: "If it has Pulse... its dead"
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Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Informative)
You should be using OSS4. I put up with the Pulse idiosyncracies until my virtual machines spazzed out. Started researching my options, and found that Open Sound was moving past the deprecated OSS3, which wasn't much better than Pulse.
Since I've compiled and installed Open Sound, I have no more sound problems, period. Everything works the way it's supposed to.
If Pulse and Alsa get their shit together, fine. If not, I'm a devoted OSS fan. Before anyone runs off to experiment, be warned - you will probably have to spend a few minutes purging Alsa from your system. There is no co-existence of the two, at least not on Ubuntu. If you're not a Linux guru, plan on following a how-to, and plan on spending a couple hours getting it right.
http://www.opensound.com/ [opensound.com]
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound [ubuntu.com]
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Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an OSSv4 converted too - being being unable to get vmix or Pulse to work right, Alsa could turn the volume as high as Windows. Now in OSSv4 everything works fine, except being unable to detect the jack, which is annoying.
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Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Interesting)
And even if it doesn't actually damage anything, amplification can cause clipping [wikipedia.org]. On the other hand, many sources really are too quiet and don't fully exploit the available dynamic range, so having a way to increase sound volume up to the point where you'd start overdriving the hardware would be nice. But that appears to be beyond the state of the art for online algorithms. (Offline, people have been normalizing volume for years.)
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Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Insightful)
All these informed-sounding folks, living in some perfect netherworld that doesn't really exist. *sigh*
If I have a recording that is too quiet (for whatever reason), it is reasonable to be able to turn it up so that it's not too quiet anymore.
Not every recording is stuffed all the way up to the max at 0dB [wikipedia.org]. Some are far quieter, whether on purpose or on accident. If I have a recording which peaks at -20dB, then I ought to be able to apply at LEAST 20dB of gain to it without jumping through hoops.
This is not an uncommon problem, and the best (simplest) solution is just to turn it up -- however that's done. It's been awhile since I've done any serious audio in Linux, but if PulseAudio or ALSA or whatever combination thereof requires me to buy extra hardware (WTF?) to achieve this very simple and obvious function, then it is very broken[1] indeed.
And before anyone replies and says "Oh noes! If we give the users gain, they might makes teh Distortions!!!!" This is broken in the "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that" sense. It's REALLY fucking stupid that the same operating system which allows you to do "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" without prompting WILL NOT PROVIDE MEANINGFUL AUDIO GAIN.
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who's to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)
When an application can make the soundsystem stop working for all other applications, than there is a bug in the soundsystem, not just the application that caused the problem.
Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely. PulseAudio cost me a week of effort in building my media playing machine. An entire week of trying to figure out why XBMC and Boxee wouldn't talk to the sound card.
As soon as I got rid of PulseAudio? It started working.
When an API is supposedly compatible with something it is replacing, it is the _API's_ fault when an application stops working, not the application. We already had this argument with EXT4.
PulseAudio - not ready for prime time.
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Informative)
Same here, yesterday I spent 4 hours on a media PC I built and configured for my brother in law, up to the point that everything worked at my place using SPDIF output (which already cost me 2 hours to get working in the first place). I arrive at his place, turns out he wants to use the HDMI output instead of the SPDIF. No problem, you'd guess, just go to the sound preferences and select HDMI, right? Not on linux you don;t and not with PulseAudio apparently. After dicking around with the 4 different mixers (gnome, alsmixer, pulseaudio) and 4 layers of configuration (gnome sound settings, pulseaudio settings, alsa settings, gstreamer settings) it turned out that I had to put a file called .asoundrc with some cryptic content in my home directory, and in some tab called 'switches' in the PulseAudio advanced settings had to check 4 boxes that did something with an 'iec958' (whatever that may be) and then, finally, it worked. Not very well by the way because the Ubuntu startup sound pops and stutters like hell, but after that it's more or less 'ok'.
I've been using Linux for over 10 years now and I've been telling people over and over again how even your grandma could use it, but sadly, I have to conclude that in some ways it still sucks balls for people who don't like fiddling around with obscure settings, configuration files, 4 layers of sound settings etc. I really love linux myself but let's face it, for example sound and wireless (damn wpasupplicant and 'wlan0: link not ready) are still lightyears behind Windows and (even more so) OS X in terms of usability.
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Big deal. Scratch your itch! Check out the code from CVS and contribute a fix. Don't just sit there and complain, do something about it! This is F/OSS for God's sake.
I think you're joking up until this point...
How many people would contribute fixes to Microsoft's buggy audio drivers if they had half a chance?
... and now I think you are serious. Not everyone that uses Linux is a software developer. Not to mention, of course, that not all software developers who use Linux would have the time/skillset to approach such a focused project.
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Big deal. Scratch your itch! Check out the code from CVS and contribute a fix. Don't just sit there and complain, do something about it! This is F/OSS for God's sake. How many people would contribute fixes to Microsoft's buggy audio drivers if they had half a chance?
Bah!
As a computer user I do not have time to do that. The previous to last version of Linux I tried had this "ALSA" sound driver, which was *almost* behaving OK. Then the last version had this "PulseAudio" sound driver which was completely broken. My 10 years old Windows XP operating systems gives me no problems when playing audio.
I put the blame in Distribution makers, who added PulseAudio to "production-ready" distributions when the software is clearly in Alpha stages.
ALSA is on the other hand in BETA stage IMHO. Still, it was good enough.
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also slightly disturbed by his attitude to other operating systems than just Linux. For example, this post [mail-archive.com] on the OpenSolaris mailing list.
Comments such as the following:
Then, "Unix Admin" asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called "Fedora", and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat.
As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with "Slow" and ends with "aris". ;-)
appear somewhat unprofessional for someone who is being paid for the development he is doing, and for someone on whom the future of Unix/Linux audio has been entrusted.
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:who's to blame. (Score:5, Informative)
I'll stick my neck out here. First, Pulse relies on the Alsa driver. There is no hardware issue, and the driver issue seems to be the Alsa driver. OSS4 works on my hardware, where Pulse and Alsa failed. And, of course, the Windows sound drivers work on that same hardware.
People with sound issues on Alsa and Pulse should try OSS4.
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Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea is great. PulseAudio is an excellent solution for networked audio and thin unix clients. Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless. No matter how close to bug-free it is, it is an unneeded source of bugs in that case.
Re:Useless (Score:5, Informative)
PulseAudio is NOT unneeded.
First, Bluetooth audio _sucks_ without PulseAudio.
Second, you NEED to have a sound daemon to properly manage the sound system and other sound daemons suck.
Third, ALSA's volume controls are horrible and PulseAudio really helps here.
Fourth, PulseAudio has a ton of other nice features: streams tagging and automatic volume control, joined devices, mic boost, etc.
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
...Fourth, PulseAudio has a ton of other nice features...
Now if only it would actually play music without skipping, freezing, or using 30+ percent of the CPU. Sheesh!
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if only it would actually play music without skipping, freezing, or using 30+ percent of the CPU. Sheesh!
It will, if both your kernel and Pulseaudio are properly configured for low-latency desktop usage (realtime privileges, 1000hz timer, etc). While I fully understand you being annoyed that your current distro/version ships with a default configuration that isn't fully adjusted to this very common usage pattern, it also means that the situation will get better as distributions learn how to properly integrate Pulseaudio and the remaining bugs in Pulseaudio itself are fixed and it gets better at automatically detecting and adjusting to different hardware setups. This includes making the ALSA drivers better at reporting which jacks are plugged in and things like that.
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Interesting)
"OSS is outdated and has its limitations. "
OSS3 was proprietary, it had limitations, and it sucked.
In today's world, OSS4 is open source, it is actively being developed, and it WORKS! See my post above. I can have three virtual machines open, all of them playing sound, and go back to the host machine, and play music there. No sizzle, no popping, no waiting for buffers.
OSS4. I don't understand why more people haven't discovered it yet. If the idea of compiling scares you, don't mess with it - but I really thought the majority of Linux systems could figure it out.
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
> First, Bluetooth audio _sucks_ without PulseAudio. ...which means that all of us without "bluetooth audio" couldn't care less.
> Second, you NEED to have a sound daemon to properly manage the sound system and other sound daemons suck.
No you don't. No they don't.
For the mundane user, ALSA was doing fine before Pulse came along. For most of us,
PulseAudio was a solution in search of a problem and just something else with more
moving parts to break. Even now, most users would be best served by just un-installing
PulseAudio entirely.
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats the underlying problem here - the creator may indeed be correct when he says that 'such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people', but those people are outweighed by the non-technical masses suffering a bad experience.
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Re:floating point works fine in my kernel (Score:5, Informative)
"The FPU works perfectly fine in a Linux kernel."
Uhm. No, it doesn't. The first floating point exception will ruin your whole day.
The kernel has exception handling tables. This is used for a variety of things, primarily access to user space memory. My day is not ruined.
Of course, I'd rather just disable FPU exceptions.
Why would you imagine the kernel includes functions to enable FPU access? You think they would exist but not actually work? Sorry, they work quite nicely.
FYI, I actually write kernel code. It pays well.
"The same goes for pretty much anything else, Bluetooth included if you actually care."
Again, no. You need support from the userspace for Bluetooth.
No. Look, I could eliminate userspace entirely if I wanted to. (it's just a trivial change to not exec init) I can throw pretty much anything into the kernel. The kernel rules all.
"Even better, in the kernel I can get the ultimate in real-time performance."
Wrong. Kernel threads are not any different from the userspace threads.
Um??? They sure are, and I'm not limited to threads. I can use tasklets, softirqs, regular old interrupt handlers, or my own evil invention. I can even disable interrupts if I please.
"I can get working fine-grained security like SE Linux instead of crap like that offered by the X server."
Wrong, as usual. PulseAudio does not depend on the X-server and you can use SELinux just fine. In fact, PulseAudio works under a non-privileged account, so a flaw somewhere in the mixer code won't give the attacker the instant system-level access.
I didn't suggest it required the X server. I said it was the same sort of thing. It's a userspace program that is unable to create hooks for SE Linux policy or get capability bit allocations. Sure, I can use SE Linux as a big hammer, but I can't ask SE Linux to control the internals of non-kernel code.
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Re:floating point works fine in my kernel (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm afraid you haven't yet distinguished between OSS3 and OSS4. Have you TRIED IT? If not - stop your belly aching. If you have tried it, then put some comments on the OSS4 contributor's site. Since I'm not a developer, telling me how bad it is accomplishes nothing.
Once again, OSS4 solves all of my problems. Sound just works for me, without a hitch.
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Among other distros, Ubuntu... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless.
In fact it's worse than useless (on Ubuntu): whenever I move away from my wireless access point at home (i.e. I'm on my bike on my way to the university), my sound stutters; this is probably PulseAudio spending too much time on making a new map of the network and too little time on actually handling sound waves (but I'm speculating).
Did no one test this? Am I the only person using a "ThinkPod" as a portable music player? Oh, I guess it's not one of those 95% most common use cases, so it's no biggie if it isn't handled properly.
Except that there are twenty disjoint chunks of 5% least common use cases not being fixed because they don't affect that many people, except everyone is affected by one... grr... </hyperbole> <apology/>
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Re:Useless (Score:5, Informative)
It definitely works as a daemon
On Gentoo:
Quoted from that link: "The maintainer's interest in making sure system mode is well supported is rather minimal."
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Durability in the face of errors (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not entirely true.
Now, I don't know what the exact bugs are that are causing problems. But the API should be stable no matter what happens to the outside. There should be no way to destabilize or crash the audio layer from a usermode application. So, if by "expect more correct behavior from the apps" he means "garbage in, garbage out", then that's fine. But if by "expect more correct behavior from the apps" he means "no error checking and if any app screws up then everything melts", then that's not fine.
I don't know which he means, but I've seen instances of both.
Re:Durability in the face of errors (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand up until recently most OS' treated sound cards like any other hardware. If you got a bad response from them, the OS would halt the system rather than risk physical damage. Hence sound cards are one of the leading causes of blue screens in windows 9x and XP.
One of the things Vista did right was recognise that drivers for sound cards can't be trusted and put in an additional software layer between the hardware and drivers to minimise sound card related blue screens. It's why Directsound has been removed from DX and one of the biggest reasons DX10 can't run on XP.
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Re:Durability in the face of errors (Score:5, Insightful)
A correction here is that DirectSound has not been removed, it is still a major API. What has been removed is hardware acceleration of DirectSound. In Vista/7 all DirectSound audio is software processed. The soundcard can't accelerate any of it.
The real problem was actually that there were few hardware sound accelerators on the market. Most cards were (and are today) little more than buffers you could write data in to to be played. Ok, fair enough. However what happened was that the people who made these cards wanted to support all the nifty hardware features since games made use of them. So they'd write these big complex drivers that played make believe and pretended to do hardware acceleration, all in the kernel of course. That is where the problems happened.
So in NT 6 (Vista and 7) that was removed. All audio is handled in software, and the interface to hardware is just one of giving out the finished sound to be played. Much less room for problems, though more computationally intensive. Not a problem though since processors are much faster.
Hardware acceleration now can only be done using other APIs. That is how Creative Labs does it. They implement OpenAL (their own API) on their cards in parallel to the Windows APIs. It talks straight to the card, bypassing Windows's processing.
That's not the only big usermode DirectX related change though, the graphics subsystem was moved in to user mode too. Though this still does hardware acceleration, of course, the drivers were all moved up to user space. One side effect of this that you notice is that when you install new drivers, you don't need to reboot.
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Re:Durability in the face of errors (Score:5, Informative)
Aureal folded
By "folded" you presumably mean "were destroyed by Creative using bogus lawsuits".
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Why do I care where the bugs are? (Score:5, Insightful)
While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications.
Well, the way I see it, I can either use alsa and have (as far as I can tell) no bugs, or I can use PulseAudio and have more features and more bugs.
That might not be PulseAudio's fault, but it still means that if I use PulseAudio I will have a buggy sound system. Why do I want that? Why do I want it even if it's only buggy until all the applications get fixed?
Also, the promise of networked sound is kinda... meh... maybe I'd be happy if all my laptop sound got moved to my desktop box (which is connected to my stereo) automatically whenever my laptop is connected to my home access point (and, conversely, my desktop's sound automatically gets routed to my laptop whenever my laptop does an ssh home and is not around my home access point). But as far as I can tell, this is a bitch to set up, and I'm really not inclined to go clicking around some unintuitive menu system to set my sound up right every time I leave home or go back.
So what's the benefit of PulseAudio again?
Too many choices.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The largest problem with Linux audio is not really any particular driver model / sound server. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio and Jack all work when set up properly, with supporting hardware, and supporting software. But it's never a given that a particular app will support whatever you're using, or give you the choice to select your output device if you have multiple sound cards.
I've been running Ubuntu for a long time now, and recently installed Windows as a dual boot for making music. Why? I can spend X hours on setting stuff up, or I can spend X hours on making music. I can simply count on any app that matters supporting ASIO or DirectSound on Windows.
While I actively try to convert people to Ubuntu for regular desktop apps I still tell people who plan to do audio/video stuff to go for Windows/OS X. While it's totally doable to set up a working environment in Linux if you know what you want and which apps you want, I like to play with stuff for fun. I'd rather invest my time in having fun creating content than trying to get stuff to work.
(And yes, I've tried Ubuntu Studio. Nice, but not there yet for me.)
Distribution problem (Score:5, Informative)
I've read in several places that the main problem with PulseAudio is not its design and implementation, but its instantiation. Many distributions apparently do not properly set up PulseAudio, causing it to behave unexpectedly. I found this to be the case with Ubuntu 9.04. PulseAudio worked like crap until I followed the following directions to get it set up. It's been working like a dream ever since:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578 [ubuntuforums.org]
LS
Can I tell it to go away when I don't need it? (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree with the original article [blogspot.com]: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.
But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.
An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA. ...any better ideas?
Way not to get the point: why users are angry (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if he may be 100% right about that: way not to get the point!
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is. Especially if it appears the same "problems" have been solved satisfactorily at least 10 years ago on every other OS in mainstream use.
In the meantime, Linux has changed both the audio driver model (ALSA, OSS, who knows what else), and in addition to that, the "application interfaces" (arts, esd, PulseAudio, etc.) so frequently, that it is hardly any wonder that application developers are taking the piss and not updating their software to match the bugs/workarounds to whatever the current "flavor of the week" API for audio interfacing is.
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem, so if things used to work before, and now they don't, of course you're going to blame PulseAudio. Even if it is not by itself the "real" culprit.
10 years ago, sound DID work reliably in Linux (Score:5, Informative)
That was on 486 hardware and even worse!
The problems started with ESD or esound, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon. Prior to that, sound daemons were unusual. Nobody actually ran one. Enlightenment (the insane game-inspired window manager) got one, GNOME briefly used Enlightenment, and we've been stuck with sound daemons ever since.
The OSS to ALSA transition was the other botch. It used to be that an app just did open() on /dev/audio or /dev/dsp and made sound. Any competant UNIX programmer could handle that. Now we have a kernel API that is essentially unusable, so you have to use ALSA libraries to do anything. Actually, those are **barely** usable.
Really, it wasn't always like this. My 486 DX4-75 with 8 MB RAM (slackware, fvwm-1.x) could handle audio. Back then, programmers didn't fuck around adding bugs and bloat. They wrote stuff that worked, nice and solid, on the hardware that we had.
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Could you get sound from multiple sources? (Score:5, Informative)
One problem that many forget looking back on the "good old days" of sound is that you couldn't get sound from more than one thing. On single task OSes like DOS this wasn't a problem, you only ran one app. However for multi-tasking OSes it meant that whatever opened the soundcard first had control until it gave it up. This was problematic for many reasons. Meant that you couldn't even do something simple like play an alert sound from the OS if someone was playing MP3s (not such a problem in the 486 days since those were hard pressed to decode MP3s in realtime).
Well, that's where sound daemons come in. The OS mixes sounds from multiple apps and sends it to the soundcard. Thus you can have multiple programs using sound, just like video. What's more, it'll let you do things like control the volume if an app neglects a volume control. Firefox doesn't seem to have a volume control, but the Windows 7 mixer has no problem adjusting its volume, independent of the system.
There is no reason why this should be a problem. Windows and OS-X do it just fine. There is a sound layer the OS has that you write drivers for an all apps can interface with. You can extend/bypass that with your own APIs if needed (like OpenAL or ASIO). It works really well. For that matter on Windows now they have created the concept of Universal Audio Architecture which is a standard way for devices to expose their functions to Windows, and thus work without device specific drivers.
There is no reason Linux can't do this as well. You can have an audio daemon, and should. What need to happen is time send to be spent designing things in an intelligent way first, and then implement them so that they don't change all the time. Have a standard ABI that the driver writers develop for, and a standard API(s) that the software developers write for. Have standard mechanisms for people to add to or override that if needed.
It'll work fine, if designed well, implemented well, and not fucked with. You can't change the spec every other week. It needs to be laid out and stuck with.
This isn't theoretical, as I said OS-X and Windows do it, and have been doing it for some time.
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The Vista Defense! (Score:5, Insightful)
At least with Vista the problems with video drivers, and various other hardware devices was sorted out within a couple of months. In Linux the way audio is handled is an absolute mess.
Re:The Vista Defense! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ubuntu is ruining Pulseaudio's reputation (Score:5, Informative)
A legend in its own mind (Score:5, Insightful)
The sound on my =bare metal= install of Fedora 10 didn't work.
After much forum-searching, config tweaking, and pounding-of-keyboard, I eliminated PulseAudio.
The sound worked.
Tell me again about PA's awesomeness.
computers are hard (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes mplayer will have sound, and totem will not, and other times, the opposite is true. Since the switch to pulseaudio, I have never seen a time when they both worked. Just a half hour ago there was no sound in miro. The volume slider in miro was turned up, the system volume was turned up, and my speaker volume was turned up. When I right clicked on my sound icon, went to preferences, and flipped to the "applications" tab, I found yet another volume slider labeled "miro" that was turned all the way down.
A few months ago I bought new speakers and a new sound card because my sound stopped working. The new hardware still didn't work, and a few days later, I found some random profile or device or something that was muted, but to even see that menu I had to change the default device in some gui I had never seed before, and then change it back. Starting about a month ago, whenever I play a youtube video, sound will not work for anything but flash (even after I close firefox) until I killall npviewer.bin
For some reason, when "surround" is muted on my laptop, my headphones don't work, but everything else does like normal, and if PCM gets muted, I will only get sound back if I turn the volume all the way down for a second, then turn it back up. Also, my USB headphones and USB speakers have never worked in linux.
The new surprises with every upgrade is also pretty fun. It used to be that I could just do a killall "pulseaudio" then /etc/init.d/alsasound restart, and everything would be back to the old way of working, but recently it just breaks everything even worse, requiring a reboot to fix. I'm hoping that a clean wipe of everything, and installation of ubuntu 9.10 may magically fix some of these random idiosyncrasies, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
PulseAudio is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had three systems with audio problems. Two Ubuntu-based (8.04, 9.04), a third OpenSuSE-based. All with PulseAudio. All had oddities- ranging from the sound working only during X session startup/shutdown (and not in-between), through to the audio skipping, repeatedly, when changing the current desktop. These were on reasonably decent machines, by the way. Machines that should gobble up and spit this data so fast that it barely dents CPU usage.
In each case, disabling PulseAudio and using, well, anything else, caused the problem to go away. OSS, ALSA, didn't matter, they both worked. Sometimes it was easy to remove PulseAudio, and sometimes it took a bit of work. Ubuntu 9.04 was a challenge. No, scratch that, it was a fight.
I look around, I see horror stories and widespread problems with PulseAudio.
I see claims that it works, if you configure it "properly". You know, I heard the same vague defence regarding Windows' instability. I didn't believe it for Windows either.
I've heard that PulseAudio has a great set of features. However, I have no interest in digging into what these features might be. The core feature that I want above all else isn't supported by PulseAudio. That feature?
Playing seamless audio.
PulseAudio can't even get that right. Stutters and skips are the norm, audio systems that worked previously no longer do, and the backers of this abomination are in abject denial about it. There are widespread complaints about it across multiple applications and multiple operating systems, and still it "isn't configured properly". You can't be serious. Complaints about PulseAudio are not really shared by the majority of technical people? Oh, yes they are.
If you want to provide a reasonable sound system, a *core* focus has to be on providing a working sound system. Get the core functionality right, then move onto features. Stability, correctness. Get the basics right. Also understand that API users may stuff things up, and falling over and dying is not the correct thing to do. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, not fragile.
PulseAudio did *not* do this. Any of this.
The order of the day seems to be to blame everything *but* PulseAudio. The apps are broken, the drivers are broken, the operating system maintainers didn't integrate it properly, it's not configured properly for the user's machine, the people complaining wouldn't be complaining if they were more technical, a lot of distros have adopted it so it must be good. Did I miss anything here? This has been the argument thus far.
I'm going to be different. I'm not going to blame the developers, the applications, the users, the knowledge of the users, the operating system developers, or anyone else. I'm going to blame the one at fault, the *cause* of these problems. The one thing in common with this incredible list of problems.
PulseAudio is completely and utterly broken- in design, in implementation, and in application. It is horrendous, shameful, and embarrassing.
Re:Why is OSS no longer in the kernel? (Score:5, Informative)
OSS was deprecated because 4front pulled the rug out from under users and started demanding money for binary-only versions, and it was easier to write an entire API from scratch instead of trying to fix the crap they'd left in the kernel.
OSS4 is never going in because 4front has a dangerously wrong idea of how the GPL2 works [4front-tech.com] and think they they have the right to infect applications using this API with their licence.
Do not want!
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Re:Why is OSS no longer in the kernel? (Score:5, Insightful)
The 4Front interpretation of GPLv2 is irrelevant - the source code is triple-licensed under GPLv2, CDDL and BSD licenses. ALSA is an excellent example of Linux throwing away a solid API and implementation that could have evolved to support the few critical features it lacked (which is exactly what happened in FreeBSD for example) in favour of a half-baked alternative. The original ALSA API is poorly designed by people who clearly have very limited knowledge of OO principles, but wanted to apply them all the same. This piss poor API was never well documented, and the actual audio drivers are not of the same quality as the ones in OSSv4. The ALSA developers answer to the poor API? Slap another, equally poor, equally undocumented API on top of it. What a fucking mess.
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Re:It may be buggy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do more than .0001% of linux users need autoforwarding, or network transparency at all? Or should we focus on what the other 99.9999% want, which is high performance, low latency, non-crashing sound like the other two major OSs have.
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Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of devices stream data over a network and play it locally as audio. That does not necessarily make any of them a "network based" audio device in the sense that they can be driven by PA.
Audio is not unique in needing device ACLs adjusted; it should not need a unique solution for doing that. In fact, having an audio server handle ACL adjustments when something else does that is a violation of the Unix philosophy of chaining together simple tools that focus on one thing.
Application-controlled latency is good. Library-enforced latency is bad. Sending audio from one user-space process to another is a case of the latter.
After reading your post made "as a PA developer", I'm even more down on it than before.
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Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is (Score:5, Insightful)
latency sucks... If I play a note on my guitar or keyboard, then I do not want to hear the sound more than a couple of milliseconds late... this is precisely why I still do my music recording on a windows box... I still can't get rid of it much as I really want to... I did have a perfectly good Ubuntu Studio setup going back on the LTS (Dapper Drake) before the current one, but certain issues pushed me into upgrading to the next LTS (Hardy Heron) and boom... pulseaudio screwed it all up... I was completely dumbfounded when I discovered it was an experimental sound system just dumped into the LTS without any attempt to get the default settings correct. I expect the LTS version of Ubuntu to actually work out of the box. So as a result, I got my XP box out of mothballs and went back to using XP for recording.
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Re:Article is doomed to failure, but PulseAudio is (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing synchronization and latency. There's no particular reason you can't buffer up a few seconds of audio, yet make sure that audio is played exactly when the video calls for it.
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Re:The problem isn't the idea (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the problem is that the implementation sucked. Past tense. There were various CPU-eating problems. They were fixed a long time ago.
Really, the entire Linux sound system sucks. PulseAudio is one of the better parts of it. But because PulseAudio is visible, and because an old distribution once shipped with a CPU-eating PulseAudio, it makes the perfect scapegoat today.
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