On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 07:43:57AM -0500, Nate Bargmann wrote: > I have better things to do with my time than spend it in a > painful exercise trying to manage audio settings. I find PA truly > useful these days. Yes, I'm using Devuan Jessie.
I for one have two[1] functional sound cards in my main desktop: on-board and a PCI one, mostly because of falling for the 5.1 scam[2] in the past, but even nowadays that I returned to plain stereo, that's useful because you can reliably have headphones and speakers running at the same time. What I want is the ability to tell programs which audio sink to use, and occassionally switching that. PulseAudio would fit that nicely! The usual downsides of PA don't apply for me: * it's a desktop so I can afford constantly wasting 7% of a core (wakeups are a murder on battery) * I do no audio processing so PA's inability to handle high-resolution high-frequency audio doesn't matter (remember, human ear can't hear above 16-bit 44kHz[3]) * I hardly play games so I can stand the sound lag Thus, I'd be happy to use PulseAudio. Alas, I get: * constant noise: quite quiet but loud enough to be infuriating, especially when no audio is playing. Raw ALSA has no such problem. * sound completely fucked up after a suspend/resume: it becomes high-pitched and clipped until "killall pulseaudio" (it restarts automatically). Only response to the bug report: "your sound card doesn't support suspend". Which is bullshit as this problem happens with PA even if no sound was playing at suspend time, while ALSA gets it right even if there _is_ sound during suspend. And, since PA doesn't touch hardware directly but uses ALSA, the culprit is obvious... So, I don't use PulseAudio not because I don't want to, but because it's as buggy as systemd or avahi, and the bugs are show-stoppers. Meow! [1]. And a HDMI pseudo-card that gets in the way. [2]. There's no 5.1 sound sources, unless perhaps if you watch DVD movies (I don't); also unless you can remodel your room specifically to place the speakers right, the sound field is _worse_ than plain stereo or headphones. [3]. Technically you _can_ hear more than undithered 16-bit, you just need a lab-quality quiet room, high-quality speakers with volume set to near the pain threshold, and a sample near the hearing threshold (ie, zeroes on all but lowest bits); dithered 16-bit is ok even then. Oh wait, you _don't_ have such a lab or don't use pathological volume settings? Then 16 bits is enough for you. As for 44kHz, Nyquist theorem says any frequency up to 22kHz can be reproduced exactly, and not a single human has been demonstrated to hear ultrasound in a controlled test. Thus, anything above is "audiophile" scam. Unless you do further processing, that is -- it's easy to pile up errors, especially resampling at a different frequency drastically reduces quality so you want to use much higher precision to reduce the errors. -- A MAP07 (Dead Simple) raspberry tincture recipe: 0.5l 95% alcohol, 1kg raspberries, 0.4kg sugar; put into a big jar for 1 month. Filter out and throw away the fruits (can dump them into a cake, etc), let the drink age at least 3-6 months. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
