Anyone using pulseaudio?
 

I've been thinking of trying pulseaudio and was wondering if anyone here has already tried it and what they think of it? I've been reading up and it sounds pretty straight forward.

I'm curious as to why.

Pulseaudio's only purpose is to allow you to play more than one audio stream at once. But if your applications are outputting sound through ALSA, then you can already do that. And if you have applications that will only output through OSS, then the OSS4 drivers will give them software mixing without introducing the massive amount of latency that Pulseaudio does.

Daedra, this thread covers me getting pulseaudio up and running on my laptop:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...urrent-792080/

I quickly abandonded it because many of the supporting programs for controls required a number of GNOME dependencies, which I didn't want to try to get to work. However, I did manage to get sound working, so I consider it a successful test.

For what it is worth, Pulse Audio, at least how it is deployed in Ubuntu 9.10, is a huge resource hog compared to alsa. I have uninstalled pulse audio on Ubuntu and I use only alsa, which does everything I would ever need.
When Ubuntu 10.04 comes out, I will likely switch to Xubuntu, or Lubuntu, since these variants of *buntu do not use pulse audio.

I avoid pulseaudio like the plague. It's most bogusly unslack! ;)

I removed it from my Mandriva system, because of very very poor sound quality.

yeah I got mixing working fine with alsa, but i noticed some distributions install pulseaudio by default. I have heard bad things about it and these post seem to reaffirm that. I'm just going to leave it alone.

Thanks

I think that's a side-effect of having GNOME as a default desktop.

GNOME can be compiled without PulseAudio, although this is not what the developers intended.

Anyway, I like it: it has some neat features, and the per-stream volume setting has proven pretty useful to me. I also never had problems with the new versions with all the recommended patches.

BTW, I'm still searching for a Slackware fan who likes things like PulseAudio and the modern *kit stuff.

Ivishti,
So is pulse audio part of Gnome then? Does this mean that any Gnome based distro will have to incorporate pulse audio as new versions of Gnome are released?
I noticed that your Livno distro uses Gnome. Does Livno use pulse audio? And if so, do you find that pulse use more of your CPU compared to alsa?
For what it's worth, there seems to be very few Ubuntu uses who like pulse audio. There are many long threads on removing Pulse in Ubutnu:
http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/sh....php?p=8284273
I don't know how much of this would apply to Slackware with pulse audio, but here is a comprehensive thread of pulse audio workarounds and fixes:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578

I'm a fan of Pulse...
 

I am using PulseAudio, because I like the very cool music visualisations from ProjectM; and ProjectM needs pulseaudio...

With modern hardware I don't see so much difference in speed / cpu usage between Alsa and PulseAudio.

In my opinion, I'd skip pulse unless you are using it for a reason. I used pulse to capture sound from JACK-unaware applications (that cannot be compiled to support JACK, like Skype or Flash in Firefox). I would never run it as a permanent sound daemon...it really is not necessary and does not improve anything IMO. If you have a reason for running pulse, then go ahead, but I would use it sparingly and only when necessary. It is not the best, most stable sound daemon I have ever seen. Far from it, in fact.

I have a home recording studio set up and use JACK for this purpose. For day-to-day operation, ALSA is great. I am one who avoids pulseaudio like the plague. I can patch all kinds of equipment together physically and with JACK, but pulseaudio has always confused me. It seems very unintuitive and just plain klunky.

I've used it with GSB
 

I installed Gnome SlackBuild 2.26 on top of Slackware64 13.0. I made use of PulseAudio to get simultaneous sound output between my host and VirtualBox VM's. With ALSA alone, I didn't have any trouble with multiple sources on the host. VirtualBox was my only roadblock. After using Pulse for a while, I began to run into intermittent no-audio issues on both host and guest OS's.

I got the itch to try AlienBOB's KDE 4.4.2 packages, so I upgraded to -current. I just installed VirtualBox 3.1.6 PUEL, and everything is working great with just ALSA.

Core i7 920
Intel DX58SO motherboard
on-board Intel HDA audio

PulseAudio is developed independently from GNOME. However, GNOME is able to use PulseAudio as the default sound server.
Every application that supports ALSA can, but this is due to the pulseaudio alsa plugin. GNOME can use PulseAudio directly using it's own API.
GNOME also has tools which are able to use PulseAudio's abilities for additional functionality in the desktop.

And BTW, Linvo does include PulseAudio and I'm happy with that desicion.

I _DO_ agree that PulseAudio creates some issues, but IMO, most of them are in the past now. A lot of things have changed and PulseAudio is supported by large projects like Ubuntu and Fedora.

Personally, I think that this "abstraction layer" (a better name: a sound server) is needed to provide some additional functionality and flexibility to the sound. Honestly, I think PulseAudio is a bit bloated, but everything else isn't functional enough.