On 03/28/2013 07:43 PM, Stuart Jansen wrote: > On Thu, 2013-03-28 at 16:58 -0600, Daniel Fussell wrote: >>> Can you even name any of the issues that PulseAudio addressed? >> Yes, network audio; and I've never see pulse do even a half decent job >> of that. If there was another problem it solved, I'm not aware of it. > Bzzzt, wrong. When PulseAudio was released one of the most popular > complaints was that it didn't support network audio. When I first saw Pulse as the default in my distro of choice at the time, that was one of the features listed, and the only reason I took a look at it. At the time, I was trying to solve just that problem. > > PulseAudio has made life so much better you probably take it for > granted. It introduced: > > - Seamless output switching. As sound hardware got cheaper and dumber, > software became responsible for handling the transition from speakers, > to headphones, to bluetooth, and back. Ever buy a fancy new laptop only > to discover plugging in your headphones did nothing if there was already > sound coming out the speakers? I did.
Nope. Been running straight ALSA on all my work-a-day systems for years, and I don't recall ever having a problem switching between speakers and headphones. Perhaps it was a function that was anticipated by my sound hardware vendor and the driver supported it already. > > - Per-application volume control. So subtle you've probably never > noticed it happening. Actually, on the one machine I have PulseAudio on, yes. And it's still annoying. > > - Re-sampling so different apps could play at different frequencies. > Remember the bad old days when some apps could play audio at the same > time but others couldn't? This was part of the problem. All I ever saw it do was corrupt the audio stream, especially on machines without at least 2 processors. I've seen some audio sync issues with it as well. And yes, I remember the bad-old days. I also remember it was only a problem with apps using OSS. So as long as I wasn't playing OpenTTD, I never saw the problem. Frankly, it was a feature in my book; I hate getting email notification chimes when I'm playing OpenTTD. ;-) > > - Lower power usage. Your snide remarks aside, previous solutions used > more power because they relied on frequent wakeups to avoid underflow > while PulseAudio was carefully designed to dynamically readjust to wake > up a little as possible while still maintaining responsiveness. It made my laptop overheat, and killed my system performance on my less heat-sensitive devices. The only thing I've seen worse than that was kdm on KDE4 releases before about 4.8. Just to be clear, my snide remarks are simply a truthful representation of my experience with PulseAudio, and are in no way a reflection on you Stuart; your still my hero. Well, you and Joe Hall anyway. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
