[arch-general] Doubts with 'apulse'

[Jens John]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2020, at 17:59, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general wrote:
> I stopped using firefox with apulse a long time ago, since firefox
> support for ALSA and Jack works, it's just a PITA to use firefox for
> audio and video.
> 
> As for ALSA support, it often happens, that you need to close all tabs
> and sometimes even firefox completely, before you can open a single tab
> with working audio output, not to mention the Jack support oddities.
>

For me, Firefox + ALSA works well. But I don't use software mixing (dmix, dsnoop) and let Firefox take exclusive control of the ALSA device when it wants to play audio. Perhaps this setup would work better (unless you want/need software mixing of course), and it's worth trying? 

It should be noted that ALSA is full of quirks and doesn't hide messed up sound hardware/drivers from the client application (while Pulse/Jack do a good job in doing so, by design). To illustrate this, it's enough to browse the mpv bug tracker for ALSA issues. Given that the ALSA sound backend is deprecated anyway, it's no surprise that some things don't work and won't likely ever get fixed.