[Sugar-devel] Sound levels and pulseaudio fallout

2009-05-20 Thread Martin Langhoff
(written as part of the brussels test session)

One thing consistent across the machines we're testing with Soas is
that many (most?) of them get very low sound levels. This is an issue
with Fedora and Pulseaudio.

The fedora devel list is aflame with discussion about this, and it
appears that -- beyond the flaming -- the problem is real, and not
easy to solve (meaning it won't be solved in F11). There's an
excellent article on the topic @ http://lwn.net/Articles/330684/

It looks like Fedora (for this release) will recommend people to use
alsamixer (and a revived oldstyle gnome-mixer) as a workaround. I'm
not sure if there's a scripted way to get the other channels pumped
up to their max levels properly -- and if you do it blindly, it seems
that you might overshoot the mark and saturate.

Thought I'd flag it as it's quite likely to hit many Soas users. (On
known hw such as the XO it's easier to rig it).

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langh...@gmail.com
 mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Sound levels and pulseaudio fallout

2009-05-20 Thread pgf
martin wrote:
  (written as part of the brussels test session)
  
  One thing consistent across the machines we're testing with Soas is
  that many (most?) of them get very low sound levels. This is an issue
  with Fedora and Pulseaudio.
  
  The fedora devel list is aflame with discussion about this, and it
  appears that -- beyond the flaming -- the problem is real, and not
  easy to solve (meaning it won't be solved in F11). There's an
  excellent article on the topic @ http://lwn.net/Articles/330684/
  
  It looks like Fedora (for this release) will recommend people to use
  alsamixer (and a revived oldstyle gnome-mixer) as a workaround. I'm
  not sure if there's a scripted way to get the other channels pumped
  up to their max levels properly -- and if you do it blindly, it seems
  that you might overshoot the mark and saturate.
  
  Thought I'd flag it as it's quite likely to hit many Soas users. (On
  known hw such as the XO it's easier to rig it).

low-end hardware like the XO has no business running pulse.  last
i looked, simply playing an uncompressed audio stream
(admittedly, it was probably sourced remotely, but that's not
uncommon) caused pulse to consume about 10% of a 1.6Ghz atom. 

now, it's somewhat possible that my system was misconfigured --
perhaps someone should double check me on this.

paul
=-
 paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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