please take my email [email protected] off your list Thanks Stephen
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 4:30 PM, Luke Kuhn <[email protected]> wrote: > All these bugs and "no sound output" complaints with Pulseaudio bring > back the idea of finding a way to make Jack replace Pulseaudio altogether. > Removing pulseaudio is not always enough, in many but not all cases a > replacement is needed. I remember the old days of Dapper and applications > grabbing the sound card and having to reboot just to get audacity to > connect to alsa, and as late as Hardy using sound cards that would only > connect to one program at a time. This while all those Windows clunkers > made that one program a sound server that seemed to work fine. We have a > good sound server too, jack, and a good front end for it, qjackctl, which I > discovered in ubuntustudio hardy. > > My big desktops do fine with straight ALSA for my video editing(kdenlive) > , audio editing(audacity) and general uses. Their onboard sound cards > include mixer functions enough to play sound from multiple sources with > alsa by itself. This is apparently a hardware support capability. My intel > Atom netbook, containing a copy of the same OS, is another story entirely. > No output from any mono soundtrack in alsa, as the soundcard does not > support a mono output at all. On the other hand, pulseaudio is just too > heavy for it, killing sync in video playback, even for 360p h264 video. > > I ended up using jack as a pulseaudio replacement in that netbook. > Anything other than flash or audacity, I fire up jack from qjackctl. > > Using no sound server, only Flash, Xine, kdenlive and audacity can connect > to alsa directly on that sound card. With jack, all the video players and > audacious work fine, Mplayer and Audacious needing to be told in > preferences to use jack. Using either jack for sound or straight > alsa(xine only) with a stereo soundtrack, that same netbook will only fall > 1 or 2 seconds behind the sound and sometimes keep up entirely on a 720p HD > video at 25 fps in H264 codec. A full 30fps still defeats it. This shows > that Jack is much lighter and more efficient code than pulseaudio. In fact, > it shows that Jack is imposing very little load on the CPU compared to no > sound server at all. I learned about Pulsaudio's resource use playing with > old Pentium 3's, when Lucid could not play video files that Jaunty played > just fine. Removing pulseaudio restored the playback sync. > > Thanks to whoever put on onto using Volti to control volume with alsa > direct or via jack! That takes care of the "no volume control applet > without pulseaudio" issue and works in most DE's. You need the > classic-systray extension to put it where you can see it in gnome-shell, > comes up fine in both Icewm(traditional system tray) and in Unity if you > add it to the whitelist for systray applets. > > Audacity works fine with Jack running, the only showstoppers for running > jack full-time by itself are kdenlive (no Jack support yet!) and that old > binary blob nasty, Adobe Flash. I am using 64 bit flash direct from Adobe, > I do know if the "pulseaudio-extrasound" package aimed at making > Pulseaudio work would work with jack instead. With adobe deciding to throw > Firefox under the bus and push proprietary browsers, I have a feeling > open-source replacements for flash are about to hit the big time anyway. > > Three ways of making Flash work with Jack via alsa, gstreamer, or > pulseaudio, plus a library for direct Jack support for Flash was being > described at > > http://jackaudio.org/routing_flash > > This page dates back to 2012. All these methods are said to create some > added latency in audio from Flash, opposite the audio ahead of video effect > that a too-heavy CPU load or slow graphics will create. Have yet to test > them, I control jack from qjackctl on the netbook-and rarely use Flash to > actually watch videos, as I download and keep anything worth watching > anyway due to limited bandwidth and a preference for local copies of > everything. > > None of that matters on a big, high-powered A/V worstation, though a > direct jack/no pulseaudio solution might help with other kinds of latency > issues. What does matter is getting sound to work on a sound editing system > without forcing users to learn a lot of new programming that might send > them to another distro. > > Having to start qjackctl or configure an application in its preferences to > use Jack is one thing, having to root around on Google for what text file > to exit, commands to run, etc is quite another. > > With Precise now out, this question can again be considered for future > reference. Thankfully, in Linux distros nobody has to wait, if Pulseaudio > doesn't work for a user it can be removed and Ubuntu has been careful to > keep too much from depending on it. > > Maybe a debian package that conflicts with pulseaudio, depends on jack and > qjackctl, pulls in one of the solutions for flash and anto-configures other > applications to use Jack by default would make this something an end user > could actually work with? That would be something that could be used as an > advanced option at install or a recommended fix for situations where > Pulseaudio acts up. > > > > > -- > Ubuntu-Studio-devel mailing list > [email protected] > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel > >
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