[arch-general] Basic questions about Linux's sound system

[Jude DaShiell]

The consortium is freedesktop.org and it also made wifi-menu.  However, 
in terms of pulseaudio I think in many instances it's more trouble than 
helpful.  For one thing, the terminology in the software is alien to 
alsa and sometimes pulseaudio gets confused and I have to use a script 
to correct the sound output over here that handles alsa and straightens 
my configuration out.
People using orca have had and have issues with pulseaudio too.

On Tue, 31 Jan 2017, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2017 05:43:55
> From: Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com>
> Reply-To: General Discussion about Arch Linux <arch-general at archlinux.org>
> To: arch-general at archlinux.org
> Subject: Re: [arch-general] Basic questions about Linux's sound system
> 
> Hi,
>
> I only replied because your graphic shows "Rosegarden". If you should
> use Rosegarden, you should get rid of pulseaudio.
>
> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi rosegarden | grep Dep
> Depends On      : liblrdf  dssi  fftw  lirc  perl  qt5-tools  shared-mime-info  liblo>=0.28
> Optional Deps   : lilypond: notation display
>
> Pulseaudio is not good for this kind of task.
>
> ALSA is the only thing required for sound, since it's the layer with
> the audio drivers. Pulseaudio needs ALSA, but ALSA doesn't need
> pulseaudio. The people responsible for pulseaudio made a lot of noise
> when pulseaudio didn't work correctly with ALSA, while ALSA on it's own
> worked. It's a "consortium" of coders who cause a lot of trouble, not
> only with pulseaudio. Soundservers such as pulseaudio or jackd provide
> some comfort. For the desktop I just use the bell (beep of the PC
> speaker) and an audio interface for webradio, videos and things like
> this. Only for audio productions I'm using a sound server, jackd. You
> only need crappy sound servers such as pulseaudio for software that is
> bad programmed, AFAIK it's skype or if you want to listen to webradio
> and recycle bin crackles at the same time, without using ALSA's dmix.
> AFAIK pulseaudio allows you to play a video and a media player at the
> same time using different sample rates. In short, without some kind of
> "patch bay" only one app could use a single audio device. A sound
> server provides the comfort to connect several apps to a single audio
> device. From my audio engineer's point of view, everybody who uses
> pulseaudio either makes something fundamentally wrong or is a lazy
> android who wants to listen to several sound sources at the same time,
> without configuring plain ALSA to do it. I doubt that many humans
> seriously like to listen to several sound sources at the same time. For
> audio productions OTOH it makes sense to have a virtual patch bay that
> is real-time capable and in addition easily allows to chose sample rate
> and frames, so jackd makes sense for such a task, but even in
> this context using pulseaudio still would be counter-productive.
>
> IMO pulseaudio is good for absolutely nothing, but just could be the
> cause for serious issues.
>
> I installed a dummy package, just in case pulseaudio should be a
> hard dependency for software, that actually doesn't need it, because I
> don't want to rebuild those packages without the pulseaudio requirement.
>
> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pactree -r pulseaudio
> pulseaudio
> ??pulseaudio-alsa
>  ??cinnamon-settings-daemon
>  ? ??cinnamon
>  ? ??cinnamon-control-center
>  ?   ??cinnamon
>  ??vokoscreen
> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ pacman -Qi pulseaudio | head -12
> Name            : pulseaudio
> Version         : 2013.08.18-1
> Description     : Dummy package
> Architecture    : any
> URL             : None
> Licenses        : None
> Groups          : None
> Provides        : pulseaudio
> Depends On      : None
> Optional Deps   : None
> Required By     : pulseaudio-alsa
> Optional For    : fluidsynth  phonon-qt4  phonon-qt5  speech-dispatcher
>
> It's to funny, I never used cinnamon and never used vokoscreen,so I
> could remove them. However, in the past I used some software with a hard
> dependency to pulseaudio without having pulseaudio installed. Much
> likely cinnamon and vokoscreen will work without pulseaudio, too. The
> old AUR once provided gnome-settings-daemon-nopulse.
>
> [rocketmouse at archlinux ~]$ ls /var/aur3/gnome-settings-daemon-nopulse/
> gnome-settings-daemon.install  PKGBUILD
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
>

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