On Mon, 2014-06-09 at 18:56 +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > On Lu, 09 iun 14, 09:30:01, Steve Litt wrote: > > > > I look forward to hearing how other people do or don't work with > > PulseAudio (and ALSA) in this thread. > > I'll try to explain it simply, but I have a feeling this will turn out > quite long: > > ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is the kernel driver part plus > a library. In an ideal world it would be all you need to have sound, > but: > > - by default ALSA would not do software mixing (and most consumer grade > sound cards don't have a hardware mixer) > - the dmix plugin had (still has?) various quirks and limitations and > for a long time was not enabled by default > > Because of this in addition to ALSA on most systems one would also need > a sound server to do software mixing: aRts for KDE, esd for Gnome, JACK > for profesional audio (Ralf's domain). > > Unfortunately at this point http://xkcd.com/927/ happened, so instead of > taking one (JACK would have been a good idea probably) and improving it > to do whatever was missing some guy(s) thought it would be a good idea > to create a new sound server (pulseaudio). > > The good: > - aRts and esd died > - most (all) user applications now have native pulseaudio support, so > the fake ALSA sink that is used for programs without pulseaudio > support will probably go away soon. > - pulseaudio has interesting additional features, some of them even > useful >:) > > The bad: > - it adds complexity, especially now that ALSA + dmix mostly works for > the common use (have two applications play sounds at the same time) > - when it doesn't work it's difficult to find out why. > - it's not performant enough to also replace JACK. Professional audio is > probably not pulseaudio's goal, but if we've got to have a sound > server I'd rather we had only one that works properly for all use > cases. > > The ugly: > - sound not working seems to be happening especially when pulseaudio is > installed afterwards (e.g. as dependency of a new application) as > opposed to new installations. Since removing it quite often magically > makes sound work again not many people bother to understand what > happened or even just file (useful) bug reports. > > Hope this explains,
IMO your "Alberto Grimaldi" explanation is ok ;). I'm biased ;). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/1402330172.813.146.camel@archlinux
