On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 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.
Bluetooth headset,configured with two or three clicks of a mouse. And then reroute the sound of Skype (or whatever app) to the headset while nice background music still plays on the speakers. > 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. Have you tried PulseAudio lately? I haven't heard complains in a long time. > Remember arts and esd? They went the way of HAL. Yeah, because they sucked. Pulse doesn't (haven't in a long time; almost all the complains were made years ago). The architecture of esd and aRts was wrong from the beginning; not necessarily the fault of the devs, they were the first tries at a sound daemon. Pulse (which was PolypAudio before) learn from those mistakes and then it had its own set of evolving pains (that's when a lot of people, specially using distributions packaging before time, complained about it). HAL was different; it was to please the "lets be portable" crowd. IMHO, it was doomed from the beginning. > 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. Well, I talk with Skype and listen to background music all the time (see above). And kids these days seem to be able to handle more data streams at the same time; just some days ago I saw a 15yo cousin of mine chatting on Skype while she heard background music *and* watched and listened to a music video on YouTube. Maybe this shiny new stuff is not for the old guys like us. But I certainly like it; I love my blueetooth headset, and it "just works" with PulseAudio and Bluez (and GNOME on top of them). Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
