[arch-general] change in mount behaviour?

[Norbert Zeh]

Heiko Baums [2012.01.29 1446 +0100]:
> Am Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:58:31 +0100
> schrieb Tom Gundersen <teg at jklm.no>:
> 
> > Sounds like possibly valid concerns. But this is not something to
> > discuss here. Please contact gnome and/or pulseaudio if you have
> > issues.
> 
> This has already been tried at least with pulseaudio. Their reactions
> are known. Blame ALSA for PA's faults while ALSA supports those card
> perfectly since years, and crippling those audio cards down to stereo
> with some very strange ALSA configs, because PA's upstream just doesn't
> have the knowledge about those cards and about pro-audio.
> 
> Maybe I'm not the best to explain the concepts of those audio cards,
> but that doesn't mean that I don't know anything about them. When I
> bought this card it took me a while until I got to know what they are
> doing and how they work, so maybe I can't explain it in detail. But that
> doesn't mean that I'm missing anything.
> 
> > We just package their software, we don't decide their
> > priorities or policies.
> 
> But you and the developers of the other distributions are the people
> who decide if they just want to package what upstream thinks should
> become a standard. So if every distribution just install PA as a
> dependency then nothing will change and a very big regression regarding
> audio will happen, because PA will indeed become a standard, and no
> pro-audio user will be able to hear and work with sound anymore. If the
> distros refuse to package those bad software dependencies, then also
> upstream probably has to change their minds.
> 
> So I think this has to be discussed with downstream, too.
> 
> > And I think this discussion has gone on for way too long...
> 
> Think about it again. Think again why this discussion about PA always
> pops up on every occasion in almost every mailing list and forum.
> Rethink if pro-audio users really have no knowledge about the
> underlying concepts. I bet pro-audio users have a lot more knowledge
> than PA upstream and all the people who claim that pro-audio users are
> missing something.
> 
> I'm sure that this discussion will always pop up until these issues
> regarding PA are fixed. That said, it will end if either PA will fully
> support those audio cards and show that they learned about (pro-)audio
> or if PA wouldn't be installed as a dependency anymore by upstream as
> well as by downstream of all distros and just be treated as a normal
> and optional piece of software which can but doesn't need to be
> installed and used.

Let me chime in here to add an important point to this discussion.  The whole
discussion so far sounds as if PA works great with non-pro cards and breaks only
on pro cards.  That's not the case: PA has problems even with what is probably
the lowest end of chips: built-in audio chips on all my motherboards.  And the
behaviour I observed is exactly what Heiko and Ralf observed too: everything
works great with ALSA and starts to act up when using PA.

Things I observed (on Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Arch...so it's not
distro-specific) were way too low input (mic) and output volumes even when
setting the volume controls to 100%.  I really wanted to use PA because it
offers something ALSA does not: simultaneous audio streams from different
applications (i.e., when firing up Windows in a VirtualBox, it does not hog my
audio).  So I googled for hours, read through forum posts, etc. and all I could
find were hacks that either didn't work at all or resulted in the right volume
but at completely unacceptable distortion levels.

So, I'm almost certain that I am doing something wrong with configuring my audio
setup using PA, but the whole point of PA as I understand it is to make using
audio easier, at least for completely standard desktop audio use, which is what
I want.  So, either it should work out of the box or, similar to the arch way,
there should be clear documentation on how to configure things right.  The
former is not the case on my hardware, and hours of googling did not lead me to
the latter.  So, to me it feels like this "standard" is moving us way too close
to Windows land for my taste: if you know the magic incantation, then all will
just work, but you have to be a member of our guild to be taught the
incantation.

As many others, I am happily running without PA and will probably be able to
continue to do so for a long time because I don't even use Gnome or KDE.  I just
felt the need to add to the discussion because some people in this thread defend
PA as the golden bullet for desktop audio use, which it absolutely isn't in my
experience.  If this was a result of using hardware that simply isn't supported
well by linux drivers, then that would be my fault, but, as already said, plain
ALSA works simply great.  Throw PA into the mix, and things start to go wonky.

Cheers,
Norbert