[arch-general] Bluetooth headphone

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Tue, 2010-01-26 at 12:08 +0200, Manne Merak wrote:
> On 01/26/2010 11:28 AM, Ng Oon-Ee wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Manne Merak<mannemerak at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >    
> >> Thanks, did all that already, as I said I can play audio using mplayer or
> >> aplay etc.
> >> But how do I get all apps that use it.
> >> Actually a guide that explains the roles of, alsa, phonon, gstreamer, xine,
> >> pulseaudio etc and how they fit together these days will also work for me.
> >> (as I understand KDE4 uses Phonon, which uses GStreamer as backend? which
> >> uses ALSA? sounds like a bit of abstraction madness going on)
> >>
> >> Manne
> >>
> >>      
> > To get all apps to use it set a pcm.!default
> >
> > Personally, I find using pulseaudio to manage it (moving streams etc)
> > to be much easier. BT headsets run out of battery, if that happens you
> > have to manually change .asoundrc and perhaps restart sound-generating
> > apps, if you're not using a sound server such as pulseaudio.
> >
> > If you want to read up on the different sound components, just do a
> > google search. There's tons of articles out there, some very good,
> > mostly a bit crap. Lennart Pottering (dev for Pulse) has a
> > particularly good one I recall. Most on Arch wouldn't like his
> > conclusions though.
> >
> >    
> 
> That's what I thought, thanks, will try Pulseaudio (thou I have been 
> warned by others).
> So am I right in understanding that in a "perfect world", all programs 
> will support Pulseaudio (config and mixing) and in-tern it will use ALSA 
> to do the lowlevel hardware side?  (thus Pulseaudio will replace all the 
> other sound servers and layers out there)
> 
Try and find a program which pulse cannot handle, either natively or
most likely through the alsa-plugin and padsp, the OSS emulator.
Admittedly, there are bugs in the alsa-plugin for pulse, but its
actively worked on by a paid developer who listens to well-mannered
suggestions (not the typical linux fanatic going "I don't want anything
to be different from 10 years ago when sound on linux was perfect").

And no, pulse will not replace all the other sound servers and layers.
For pro-audio, JACK reigns, and will do so in the foreseeable future.
Pulseaudio is meant for common desktop use, end of. Fortunately, that's
exactly where most of us are with regards to sound.

I think it bears repetition, for most programs (which don't try to use
ALSA in complicated ways) you only need to use pulse's alsa-plugin and
it'll work with pulse no problem. Sound APIs such as gstreamer already
support direct pulse output.