[arch-general] problem with pulseaudio when resuming from pm-suspend

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 10 Mar 2012 10:35:07 +0200
schrieb Thanasis Georgiou <sakisds.s at gmail.com>:

> No it's not.

Sorry, but it is.

> The developers decided they want it a part of their
> desktop environment and now it's a dependency.

And that's the problem and the reason, why those flame wars regularly
pop up if PA is mentioned. Those dependencies are absolutely not
necessary resp. if those DEs are designed to only work with PA then
it's a misconception in those DEs.

I do see that PA can give some additional features for some users, but
those users who really need these features are the vast minority. Who
really needs to move a sound gapless from an internal sound card to a
USB sound card? Who really needs PA to set different volume levels for
different programs? Every program I know has its own volume control. So
PA may be seen as a little bit more comfortable, but it's not
necessary. Just two examples.

The mixing of the audio output of several programs is also not an
argument for PA, because ALSA does this perfectly with its dmix by
default for years. Well, meanwhile there seems to be an issue with some
software not detecting an audio device anymore if another software is
already playing sound. Stopping both programs and starting them in
reverse order makes both programs play sound at the same time again.
This seems to mostly happen with KDE/Qt-Software. But that's a
different topic, and most likely a bug in either kdelibs, qt or ALSA,
but installing PA is not a solution.

So there may be a few users for whom PA makes sense, but not for the
most people.

> You obviously have
> problems with PA, I saw your other thread, but this doesn't mean it's
> useless. Have you tried reporting your problems to PA and providing
> data about your cards so someone can fix them?

Yes, there is a bug report about the ice1712 (envy24) audio cards in
upstream's bug tracker for years. It was recently been fixed by giving
a asound.conf for ALSA which cripples those (semi-)professional audio
cards to simple stereo cards. I then reopened this bug, explained why
this is not a solution, and never heard anything about this again.
Instead the PA developers now regularly say that PA is not meant for
professional users but only for consumers.

This also proves that PA is not working correctly and most likely never
will. And this also proves that PA should not be made as a dependency
for DEs, because it is not meant for everybody.

That's why I regularly say that there wouldn't be a problem if PA is
only treated as a normal, and especially optional piece of software,
and not as a dependency for anything.

Keep in mind that most users use a stereo or maybe surround sound card
like SoundBlaster or AC'97, I guess like you. I have no doubt that PA
works with such sound cards. But even if probably most users use such
cards those are only two cases. There are a lot of ice1712 (envy24)
audio cards from the simplest ones like M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 up to
the most professional ones like the RME Hammerfall which are totally not
supported by PA. And if you knew those audio cards and how they are
working you would agree that crippling them to stereo is really not a
solution, not even a dirty workaround.

I don't know how many other sound cards don't work with PA.

ALSA, btw., supports every sound cards incl. those ice1712 cards out of
the box, maybe in conjunction with envy24control from alsa-tools. So
that the PA developer usually blame ALSA for being the reason for the
PA issue is also nonsense. It's not an ALSA issue, it is a PA issue.

> Maybe contact Gnome/KDE and purpose to make
> pulseaudio optional or at least, easy to disable?

This should indeed be done. I personally don't use GNOME or KDE so I
can't file a bug report there. But I will do it for KDE or Qt as soon
as I see that the current dmix issues are a KDE or Qt issue.

> That said, I really like pulseaudio. It fixed every single problem I
> had with flash playing audio without killing everything else and the
> application-specific control is nice.

If you had issues with flash playing audio why didn't file a bug report
to Adobe or probably ALSA? I never had any problems with the audio
output of flash. Using PA is just a workaround but no fix for this
issue.

Application-specific volume control may be a nice gimmick but is
definitely not necessary as I explained above.

With that said Ralf is totally right with his explanations.

Heiko