On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 8:08 PM, Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org> wrote: > An answer from a different Walter <G>... > >> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking >> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal >> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and >> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and >> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that. > > [...deletia...] > >> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary >> user in a generic wide way. > > I'll throw the question back to you. What specific benefits do you > see? Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.
Debugging. I know which app sounds comes from, in the event that it's ambiguous. I know whether or not I need to adjust the sound settings within an app based on the per-app volume menu. Mixing. Yes, I understand there's dmix. There's no obvious interface to control per-app mixing levels. Where an app doesn't offer individual volume control, that's sometimes useful. These are real-life benefits for users. Maybe not you. *Nobody* can tell you that PA is right for you, because you've rejected it and because you're satisfied with what you have. If what you have works for you, great. Honestly, a pure-ALSA configuration works for me right now. Some times, it hasn't, and I've used PA at those times. > Sound > daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem. And if > they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new ones > of their own. I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was all the > weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG (Toronto area > linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again after installing > pulseaudio. > > Remember arts and esd? They went the way of HAL. Nuff said. The > thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well. Try > listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean. Or play a game with sound effects and music at the same time, and see that mixing exists for a reason. (And then turn off the in-game music and play something appropriate.) -- :wq
