Pulseaudio praise
 

The latest set of configs in pulseaudio are a definite improvement.

I made the unusual (for me) step of copying in the .new files and as well as undoing whatever configuration I had made I got a better interface.

I am on record as giving very negative opinions on pulseaudio, trying to dodge it for years and calling it the worthless, gutless, purposeless piece of eye candy that is pandering to point & click merchants, and those opinions are largely unchanged. But at the risk of sounding inconsistent, I have to note the improvement.

I still shut it off when working with jack, but my uses for audio on my computer are an edge case, compared with most. :) That having been said, pulse has come a very long way, and I'm optimistic about where pipewire will go.

pipewire?

PipeWire is a realtime Audio/Video server, and basically the successor of PulseAudio, in the same time replacing the JACK server.

It is already added to Slackware-current, but just as Plasma5 hard dependency, and unfortunately there is no runtime setup, so we need to imagine some ways to run the PipeWire daemons.

There are differences on behavior between PulseAudio (which can be started in demand) and PipeWire, where its daemons (actually they are three) are supposed to run since user logins, until user logouts.

And the cherry on top of cake is that the PipeWire daemons are supposed to be run by systemd as "user target" services, then they lacks the support to daemonize themselves and auto-quit on user logout like the PulseAudio server.

However, we already imagined ways to work around those issues, for example by using a daemon supervisor which got the ability to talk with elogind and to handle auto-quiting on user logout, thanks to its friendly developer.

More details you can find there:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ed-4175691414/

Please note that you should NOT remove the PulseAudio package, because the PipeWire Pulse daemon only takes over the audio services at runtime, replacing the PulseAudio server, but everything else is still needed.

PS. If you want to try and/or use this daemon supervisor, please use the stable release of daemon-0.8 and the later SlackBuild, as described on this thread.

Future PA replacement.

The project site is (IMHO) sorely lacking in any meaningful end-user documentation at this point. That being the case, I'm wondering why it even got installed on my openSUSE Leap system---I don't recall ever selecting it.

Because the Wayland/Plasma5 needs it for various things, and PipeWire is not an optional dependency.

Thank you ZhaoLin1457, for sharing your knowledge.

My good opinion of Pulseaudio only lasted until my first Zoom meeting :(. I should have known better!
My soundcard is What I wanted is: Analog Mic input, HDMI speaker output; Mono or stereo doesn't matter to Zoom, as it's all mono anyway on zoom afaict.
What I get is Analog Stereo output, and (according to pavucontrol) and the Microphone is not available. dmesg reports the Microphone present & available with snd_hda_codec_realtek, which looks like a kernel module although I can't find it. My configuration options in pavucontrol are:

• Analog stereo duplex
• Analog stereo output (on by default)
• Digital Stereo (HDMI) Outout & Analog Stereo Input
• Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output
• Analog Stereo Input
• Off

What I want is hdmi out & microphone in, but If I change the default config, all goes quiet. My only input device is a stereo monitor input, which this box doesn't have. My only plugs are a 3 pin jack for earphones, and a 2 pin for external mic. Last settings change was to put in /etc/pulse/default.pa.new instead of the older one, which could be quite elderly. And of course the mic doesn't appear unless some program is actively recording.

I think you miss-configure the PulseAudio...

I suggest you to leave everything as default on PA configuration and to look on the pavucontrol.

The HDMI should be show usually as separate audio output, and you can switch between line out and HDMI out.

I for one I never had problems with both PulseAudio and PipeWire audio server.

Only that PipeWire is even greater at using the Bluetooth devices.

OK.
I emptied /etc/pulse & reinstalled PA. The configuration options in pavucontrol you see above. The good news is that the HDMI output & Analog input now has sound. I'll have to wait till tmw for a Zoom meeting.

I feel your pain :banghead:
I have a Jabra headset plugged into the pc at work and can never get it to work right when joining a meeting.
And these are meetings primarily with M$ Teams, Zoom and very rarely Jabber.
I've given up fixing the sound volume as whenever I open pulseaudio to adjust the input/output, it craps itself and all is lost.

The workaround has been to have all meetings in Google Chrome.
That is still working without hassles.

Well, I'll find out under zoom what I have. There are some optional meetings I can join. There was a big one last night, and I got that with the family on my son's (windows) laptop. But to my satisfaction, he has difficulties printing to the networked printer :D.

I remember the days (he says - sounding like an old man) when you had /etc/interrupts in linux and not plug & play; when nobody knew what firmware was; when some guy wrote me a file/etc/scsi.opts without which I couldn't run my pcmcia scsi cdrom drive; when I knew the options to cdrecord because I HAD to use it; when you had to install wvdial to dial up on your 9600 modem, because that guy had read the 97 page info file on pppd, etc.

The thing was, once you got something set up it worked, and stayed working. Now with things like cups, pulseaudio, systemd, and probably others, reliability is an issue. And these are "Better?"

I am very fond of Slackware and of Linux too.
Slackware Professional Linux - current is my daily driver.
There are some things that Linux does not do well.

Zoom in my case is one of them.
There is not good support for high end cameras.
There is no Nikon Webcam Utility for Linux. Nikon does not care.
There is no Sparkocam for Linux. Sparko in Toronto does not care.
There is gphoto2 and gstreamer for Linux and some other suckage and
that is why I have a dual boot machine rather than tangle with Entangle
or wrestle with module patches.
I do my compositions in Linux and my video editing in Linux
and my video recording and voice to text in that awful microsoft OS.
Wine is worse. Just reboot and restart.
It's still My Computer.

For me, zoom sucks. But the point of this thread is/was Pulseaudio and I am relieved to report that my microphone now works. So I am able to stop fixing it, and

On your list of points:
I think you have a special user case Regnad Kcin, and I largely agree with you on your assessments. I think that a pc running any system is a very poor instrument to have in a multimedia workshop. Macs generally have that area of the market sewn up and for quality, but you really want professional instrumentation and equipment.

As for the people not really supporting linux (like zoom), they are in business to make money. I imagine Zoom has no linux devs but contracts out the work and isn't too fussy what it gets back.

Just thought I'd add some perspective from the land of end user tech support to this.

It's important that Pulseaudio is intended to imitate the way audio devices are managed in Windows. This was a primary goal of the project back when it first started. This means that in addition to audio devices you have audio "streams" which are created by applications or other virtual sources.


What this means is that by imitating Windows you aren't just getting all the features you remember from the other OS. You are also inheriting and quirks and obscure interactions that tend to result in calls to tech support. Software developers seem unaware of these problems since they treat support like a bunch of minimum-wage janitors.


I've seen a lot of "linux" developers talk about all the great desktop features that Linux should pull in from Windows. But having worked in tech support for end users I can confidently say that imitating Windows is a bad idea. Many of the complaints people have about pulseaudio are no different from the complaints people have about the audio stack in Windows. The code doesn't matter when the idea is bad.


Food for thought...