On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Don Robertson <[email protected]> wrote: > Derek Smithies wrote: >> >> For those of you who do not know, pulse stands for "pathetic useless >> linux sound engineers". >> > > Well - that explains a lot. Sound is not something I care about too > much. I don't want to stream audio across the network or anything - I > just have a couple of desktop speakers and now a microphone to use with > Skype. > > Audio just drives me nuts. I seem to need to change the settings every > time I want to use it. Alert sounds are either so soft I can't hear them > or they blast out at a volume that makes me jump off my chair. > Everything uses a different audio control in the mixer panel - I suppose > I should go find out what PCM, LFE and MUX stand for.
AFAICT: PCM - pulse code modulation, the basic format of digitised uncompressed sound. This control usually affects anything generated from the computer itself, like system sounds, sounds from mp3's, sound from video etc. LFE - low frequency effect, the subwoofer. This will affect sound to the output that connects to a bass speaker. Note this only works if the computer itself is decoding 6 channel audio and splitting it up to the speakers. The better arrangement is to pass through all such sounds (ac3, dts etc) to an external amplifier for decoding. MUX - not sure in this context! >But really - > should I need to? I'm not running a mixing desk or anything. Those controls are in windows too, but not as poorly named sometimes. Don't forget that a given audio chipset/driver combination probably has many more controls than your sound card manufacturer actually connects to anything. > > With my Windows and Mac machines, everything just works. I don't > remember having had an issue. Well, not since Win95. I haven't seen a linux machine with any particular audio issues for quite some time. Most of my machines just work. My particular interest is multimedia (mplayer, mythtv, xbmc) and the only difficult issue I have seen is in the context of digital audio passthrough, but that is pretty well OK for me now.
