Slackware has disappointed me ;-)
 

I suppose the honeymoon had to end sometime!

Some background: I don't usually have sound on my systems and I know precious little about how to use it. Actually I prefer to work in silence. But I decided to try using alsa in the hope that it would help me troubleshoot a problem a friend of mine has been having with sound on her machine.

I quickly discovered that aplay and alsamixer will not work in Slack without some plugin called libpulse, which turns out to be part of pulseaudio. Pulseaudio?? That comes from the same stable as systemd. It's really not the kind of thing I expected to find on Slackware. What happened to the KISS principle?

And when I installed it (and carefully tracked down and installed all the extra libraries it needs) I found that I can't actually use it except as root. If I try as myself I get:
And I really had been congratulating myself on having found such a congenial and friendly distro.:(

Postscript: I've at least solved the access problem. There was some kind of discrepancy involving groups. When I used the groups command, it told me I was a member of the audio group but when I listed /etc/groups, my name wasn't there. I added it and now I can use aplay and alsamixer without going to root. But I still am annoyed at the requirement to run a pulseaudio daemon just to make sound work.

If you're really against Pulse audio you can check out the /extra directory on your Slackware installation media. I believe this is an addition in Slackware-current. There's a directory called pure-alsa-system; check out the readme.

Pulseaudio was added to 14.2 mostly because programs like bluez now require it. However with the next release you will be able to remove pulseaudio if you choose too. see this post from the development branch changelog...

If one does the recommended "complete installation," pulse works out of the box, no configuration necessary.
I'm not a fan of what's-his-name, but years ago, before PulseAudio was included in Slackware, I found it was the only thing available that fixed a problem I was having and I've been using it ever since.
As hitest pointed out, you don't have to use pulse and the instructions and related files can be found here,
http://slackware.oregonstate.edu/sla...e-alsa-system/

Edit in: Oops! I see Daedra is faster on the keyboard than I.
:)

Way to go! But you can't mix releases, can you. I'll read this up, then I'll be ready when the new release that everyone seems to be talking about finally appears. I'm glad I still do have a choice. Sort of restores your faith in human nature ;)

Hello,

1. Slackware is guaranteed to work as expected (all dependencies being included) only if fully installed. Period. If you made a partial installation, you should not complain that it doesn't.
2. Slackware version 14.2 ships with a file /etc/asound.conf with this content:
   Code:

   ---

   # ALSA system-wide config file
# By default, redirect to PulseAudio:
pcm.default pulse
ctl.default pulse

   ---

   This makes pretty obvious that by default in this version ALSA relies on PulseAudio.
3. So, would you have made a full installation, amixer and aplay would have worked.
4. Still, you can have Alsa do not depend on PulseAudio: comment out all lines in /etc/asound.conf or just remove this file.
5. To complete your Slackware installation, if you could just type as root:
   Code:

   ---

   slackpkg update
slackpkg install slackware #or
slackpkg install slackware64

   ---

But be aware that this will install all packages, including those in kdei/. Maybe consider blacklisting the ones you do not want.
Also writing:you just repeat something you heard or read from people who don't know what they are speaking about.

So, I see no ground for your complaint about Slackware in your post. But of course you are free to use any other distribution.

Best regards,

Hello hazel
I doubt you have noticed since you prefer silence but I have several posts and even a couple of threads that chronicle my attempt to love Pulseaudio, failure and subsequent hatred of all things Pulse. It presents far more problems for me than systemd does on any test distro I've tried. That said, it actually does perform an important job unlike systemd especially for those not seeking audiophile performance and just like to hear background music, movies, and possibly system alert sounds. I successfully managed to dump Pulseaudio altogether on 14.2 but it was not 1-2-3 just like with Current. Part of that is because the initial push for Pulse on Slackware was due to Bluetooth software that had a hard dependency for PA. It is my understanding that is no longer the case which is a major part of why Pat V is offering the option with Current and the next full release of ALSA-only operation. However if one wants sound in Firefox one must stick with the ESR version since anything newer has created a hard dependency on PA.

So most likely the best solution for you, at least on 14.2 and probably from now on (unless something else competes with PA as a "symphonic conductor") is to just go with PA as it does make things easier for those who have only minor casual interest in PC audio. As usual Pat V does a superb job of walking the tightrope between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Unless you start firefox like this:Source: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

Isn't this only the case if you use the pre-compiled binary from Mozilla? I know building it is not the easiest thing, but surely that removes the dependency of pulse, right?

could it be a group permission issue?

Hazel, have patience, if you're going to use a "non mainstream" distro then you shant be so quick to quit. Plenty of people here willing to help, even PV himself!

That's my understanding.

I am so glad that Slackware disappointed the OP by adopting the PulseAudio!

Because I remember with sadness the 14.0 days, when I had to spend more than a week investigating, reading and writing scripts, just to struggle with the switching between some no-name headphones, with USB digital link, and the main speakers. Honestly, I was at a step away from switching to a more traditional distro.

Fortunately, today is just a matter of plug and listen - thank you, Mr. Volkerding!

It is a huge step forward, in my humble opinion, even that's not so appreciated by the old ladies.

How do you expect mediation between differing programs that all want to send sound to an output device to happen? Something has to do it in a multitasking system. There used to be ESD, aRts, and Phonon (well, that's an API that uses various backends like GStreamer and VLC). I'm too lazy to look up more, but I remember using those 3 at one point or another.

Yes! The /extra/pure-alsa-system feature is one of the reasons I'm holding out for 15.0 to upgrade my laptop from Slackware 14.1.

If you talk about /extra/pure-alsa-system as a way of going back to the old days of manually switching the audio cards on ALSA, no thanks!

My laptop only has one audio card, and it is excellently supported by ALSA. ALSA jfw, immediately upon installation, with all of my audio-using applications.

PulseAudio might, or might not. Some people see no problems whatsoever from PulseAudio, other people encounter impossible-to-troubleshoot problems which simply do not exist under pure ALSA.

Given the choice between never-problematic software that does everything I need, and maybe-sometimes-problematic software that does everything I need, going with the former seems like a no-brainer.

I understand that other people have different priorities. That's fine. I respect that you find PulseAudio the best solution for you. Perhaps you could repay me the courtesy and understand that pure ALSA is the best solution for me :-)

I only have one device, just analog speakers on my main PC and HDMI audio out with my HTPC. I usually had to do some manual tweaking when I would first install Slackware because the default output would be a device other than the one I wanted. But after that tweak, my troubles were over. Pulse is a bit easier in that aspect, but with my usage, it wouldn't be a big deal if pulse was dropped.

There's definitely benefits of a pulse-based system just as there's benefits for a pulse-free system... some benefits are likely bigger deals to some users than others. There's nothing wrong with desiring pulse to stay in Slackware, just as there's nothing wrong with wanting a pulse-free system. Luckily, Pat has given users their option on which to choose. I'll probably just stick with whatever's default.

arTs, ESD, etc. all predate alsa back to the OSS-Free days -- which could only output one stream at a time. That problem was resolved by alsa's 'dmix' plugin.

The main benefit of pulseaudio is that it provides on the fly sound routing. The downside is that it's designed around a per-user userspace daemon which can suffer cpu starvation and can introduce latency, and/or stuttering when the system is under heavy load.

The per-user design can be a problem if multiple pulseaudio daemons running for separate users fight over access to the hardware: only one can use the hardware device at once unless you reconfigure pulse to run on top of alsa's dmix to avoid that issue (which is how I do it).

Personally, I find the pure-alsa stuff Pat provides in extra/ unnecessary as one can easily configure to bypass pulse if that is what one wants/needs, but I suppose some folks like the purity of having a pulse free system.

In all honesty, despite its 'only one stream at a time' drawback, I think I preferred the OSS-Free days.

Where to start? OK, Didier first. I am not complaining because I had to install extra packages. I am perfectly well aware that if you do not do a full install, you will have to deal with dependencies by hand. And I know how to do that. I found them all, didn't I? What I am complaining about is that one of those dependencies turned out to be PA, a package that I've heard very little good about on this forum and that seems not to be the kind of thing I expected to find as a compulsory dependency on Slackware.

The reason I didn't do a full install btw is because it involves downloading 3 GB of data and that's my entire monthly bandwidth allowance! I have a cheap Internet deal because I'm a pensioner and can't afford better.

Bassmadrigal & Chang Tzu: Compiling FF from source these days is a PITA because you need to have rust installed. And in addition, it's becoming more and more difficult not to use pulse. Mozilla seem to be deliberately closing off the alsa-only option. If you're interested, read the relevant posts in the BLFS development mailing list and you'll see what I mean.

My original post was half-humorous. Everyone says Slackware is different and in many ways it is. But it turns out to be not quite as different as I expected.

Pat had to choose between adding pulseaudio, or not supporting bluetooth. If Bluez hadn't forced the issue then we would probably still be running pulseaudio-free; though I suppose Pat may have decided to add it anyway if enough people were making noises about wanting it.

Currently that is true. As I understand it, the "lockout" is simply a single line somewhat like a kernel option. Set to "enable" and Bobs ur uncle. I've found that quite difficult on 14.2 Multilib due to difficulties with Rust and a few other components not the least of which is probably my own ignorance. So I've resorted to first Firefox-fuckPA which are a set of releases on github based on a Nightly with ALSA enabled but once I got up to v58 problems surfaced which I'm solving in two ways until the next full release. I am now using 60.3-ESR while exploring other browsers.

I do hope that with the next release we won't be forced to play constant catch-up to compile reasonably new versions of Firefox. Failing that my choices are move to a different browser or submit to PA and setup a dedicated ALSA-only version on it's own partition just for serious audio work and dual boot. The only other possibilities I can imagine are PA improving to be lighter weight more like Jack or for Jack or something like it to "step up" and be accepted as a viable alternative to PA.

I've tried apulse and other methods to get both ALSA and PA to coexist in some sort of on-demand capacity but PA doesn't play nice in my experience. It seems best to go all ALSA or all PA... well, at least to the extent that is possible since PA relies on ALSA it just requires complete control or things get quite complicated.

This is entirely rude and dismissive as well as intolerant and ignorant. I don't have a problem with people choosing PA. I just don't like being forced to use something that gives convenience but creates a huge performance hit. In fact, that's the very reason I have used Slackware for ~20 years. This begs the question why are you using Slackware then? Why not use Ubuntu if convenient hand-holding is what you prefer?

Know the feeling. In this area prices have skyrocketed on just about everything. Every week it seems something I purchase on a regular basis has gone up in price by 10% or more. The government claims the inflation rate is 1.9%. HA! I don't know what planet they are on, but it isn't earth. :)
I'm bored and tired of living on a fixed income and have been looking for a "real job," but at my age it hasn't been easy........ :)
Regardless, if you will send a postal address via a PM, I'll burn a couple of DVDs and put them in the mail. One would be a -current .iso and the other Alien's packages, plus anything else you might want. Just let me know.

In kind then imagine if a magic wand could be waved that overnight altered the UK to now drive on the proper side of the road ( ;) ) Aside from an initial burst of accidents and traffic jams I'm pretty certain the UK would soldier on as always, relatively unchanged.

Audio is extremely important to me, including that on my PC since it is shared between a number of systems. It is over 1000 Watts, cost well over $3500 USD (my soundcard was just shy of $200) and at one time was an important source of income for semi-pro audio work. So I take PC Audio performance very seriously and I do seriously test what now must be hundreds of distros, but as seriously as I take PC Audio, my PC must do what I tell it to do and achieve a reasonable balance of adapting to new standards and only Slackware fills that bill in my experience.

Since it may be that Lennart Voldemort may have been given an early heads up about IBM's acquisition of RedHat and been given permission or even a directive of "There can be only One" and considering the $38,000,000,000.00 investment, for which I'm quite certain IBM expects a profitable return on investment (if not a chance to get even w/ Microsoft in the offing), the Linux community may well be subjected to ever more exclusive domineering "options". Given such things as the "Pure ALSA" option now in Current and slated for the next release, I'm betting that Pat V will be one of the top few holdouts so I'm in for the duration. Hope to see you there as well. :)

Now, completely back on topic, if you setup PA on 14.2 as it is implemented in the Full Recommended Install complete with proper groups and permissions, it will "just work". That's what it offers - Convenience, and the cost/tradeoff is something casual listeners will likely never miss.

Here's a funny tune you can use for a laugh and some testing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDE1ZvvHVVg

I have heard the same things but don't care.

More practically, did you try what I suggested (remove /etc/asound.conf)?

That's the simplest way to get aplay, alsamixer and friends working without pulseaudio installed.

I just tried this in my Slint (based on Slackware64-14.2): remove PulseAudio then type these commands. It worked.

PS you can get my apulse package here and its md5sum. The source repository is there.

Then if really you don't want to have PulseAudio installed, you can still hear the sound of a video, e.g.:Caveat emptor: apulse works with Firefox and Chromium, but is not guaranteed to work with any software linked to PulseAudio.

The main benefit of pulseaudio over pure ALSA is lower cpu usage which makes for a smoother desktop experience. Back a few years ago when my main desktop blew up do to an bad PSU, I had to use Intel Atom based netbooks and cheap Celeron Laptop to do any computing and since I love to play music in the background I noticed those little processors could not keep up. Out of the blue just because I was bored I installed pulseaudio just to tinker around and see if it was still crappy, and lo and behold my desktop was more responsive and the same music apps and video apps I used where using between 10 to 25% less cpu then with just ALSA+Dmix alone. I used to bash pulseaudio back ten to twelve years ago because it was buggy and made my audio freeze or glitch,it was on my uninstall list when distro hopping, but since you know who :foot: stopped being the main project leader of pulseaudio it has come a long way.

Yes, that works. Thank you.

Yo, this is actually relevant to my interests. What is this about Pulseaudio and audio quality? I'm looking for a good reason to dump the Pulse packages and spend a week (lol) trying to make USB audio work properly. (Not joking).

There was a note about that in the ChangeLog too. That sounds so odd. I honestly can't think of a situation where someone would want to switch audio interfaces on the fly, with the sole exception of wireless headsets. If that's the case, then yeah...

Speaking of how an average Linux user arrives today to need "to switch audio interfaces on the fly", I would like to note that today exists PC speakers which are powered over USB, and they also get the audio signal over USB, exposing themselves to computer as an USB audio card. Some random examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-S150.../dp/B000ZH98LU
https://www.amazon.com/iMicro-Digita.../dp/B003RRY900
https://www.amazon.com/iMicro-SP-IMD...dp/B001RRDCJ6/

There are also even high quality headphones in the same style, getting the audio signal over USB, for example:

https://www.sony.com/electronics/hea...ones/mdr-1adac

Every time when an average Linux user insert his headphones like this in computer, and happens to use also speakers as shown, he needs to switch the 2 USB audio interfaces on fly.

It is trivial to do that with PulseAudio, I am not sure if it's so simple under pure ALSA.

And as a side note about "old ladies" from my vague knowledge about the Russian slang, they are the WWW2 veterans, now in their 90, and having today an all-knowing attitude, considering themselves the fathers of the nation and who should have always the last word in any issue. At least this is how they are seen today by the younger ones, who greatly respect them, but also giving some good chuckles about their gramps behavior.

Didn't I pick up somewhere, that Slackware 15 is "delayed", because Pat's now building on systemD?


:foot:

It's not April 1st, you know!

That is a very dangerous rumour to spread, even in jest, and must be quashed right now. There is absolutely no evidence for that which I have seen. If you have something solid, please provide it.

I know your post was a joke but such jokes can have nasty consequences.

Please do not bring systemd into this thread unnecessarily. We do not need more arguments about that.

While there have been some complaints on the forum for pulseaudio, there have also been a lot of people who are happy it's included (and probably many more who weren't even aware it had been included because it just worked). The complaints usually stem from people having unique audio requirements or they're against it for philosophical reasons. For most people, using pulse is easier than alsa and requires little to no tweaking (and that "tweaking" is usually just adjusting the audio out device in a GUI).

If you haven't already tried it, I would recommend it, just so you can decide whether to use it based on your own usage rather than posts on a forum. It may work out great for you or you may decide, as others have, to remove it from your system.

I don't think he'd be keeping up eudev if he were intending to trot out systemd, and -current recently got an eudev update.

When PA first came out I hated it. It was over engineered sloppiness, lately, however, it does seem to work fine, especially for most use cases.

But whether I like it or not does not matter, the OP does not like it nor want it. Once again the Slackware community has risen to the task, PV is providing an option for Alsa only (-current and 15.0), several people offered ways to deal with the problem, one member offered to ship the DVD's since bandwidth is an issue and another provided links to packages to solve the problem. This community is just as much the heart of Slackware as PV and the dev. team are. :) Sniff, got something in my eye, really...lol kudos all.

This could just be because he's read posts on the forum complaining about it and hasn't actually tried it personally. That is why I encouraged, on my previous post, to try it so they can make the decision personally.

If that was anything more than your feeling about response (as in actually measured and found accurate) then you didn't have ALSA setup properly. I am certain of this because ALSA is still working on your system,. ALSA has not been replaced since PA is NOT a sound server. PA is just working in addition to ALSA and that requires ram and cpu cycles.

The main problem with PA is latency overhead. This is not a huge deal in playback. It has some effect but it is absolutely trivial. Where latency becomes a huge problem is in recording and especially multi-track type recording where overdubs and "punch-ins" are required to have extreme precision. The level of latency for a single signal is bad enough but in successive work latency is cumulative. Without getting deeper into it until you say you do or want to do recording work, it is not a problem for you. No worries.

ALSA + DMIX the default for most non puleasaudio setups uses more resources then ALSA + pulseaudio on most sound cards(chips) that do not have hardware mixing it's simple.

Odd that ESounD is still in 14.2 in that case.

Sound was practically unusable to me in those days, so I don't miss that at all. YMMV and obviously does.

Personally, I've never had any problems with Pulse Audio. That doesn't mean I'm a fan thereof. It means exactly what it says--I've never had any issues playing audio with Pulse Audio.

You don't have to like the creator of Pulse Audio to admit that the darn thing seems to work, as does his other creation, SystemD. And I must admit that, as far as I am concerned, pavucontrol (the Pulse Audio Mixer) is a nice piece of work.

Speaking of SystemD, I have friend who sysadmins a thin client Linux network in a medium-sized (about 250 clients) business network. He sees benefits in his network environment that home users cannot see. He doesn't "like" SystemD either, but he will testify that his server's boot is much smoother with SystemD than it was with SysVinit. But he is annoyed at having to figure out journalctl to read logs.

I think part of the issue with both Pulse Audio and SystemD is the perceived arrogance of their creator. I say "perceived" because I've heard him interviewed and, in the interview, he came across as not at all arrogant.

And some persons--I'm one--just don't like change, because it means work.

Just my two cents.

Ah, so these are basically USB interfaces with integrated speakers that possibly offer nicer output than the some random OEM chip.

That does make sense.

If the gramps and old ladies thing is a dig a me, I don't get it. I don't install many of the default Slackware packages that I never use. I'm not taking the position that my use case should be the default distribution or anything.

Good info, thanks!

I used to do a lot of recording stuff, and still keep all my gear. But I have so far only been able to do some very basic recording, with no plug-ins, eq, etc. on Slackware through Audacity.

I have been meaning to get back into that, but it's a whole thing to set that up, as I'm sure we are all aware.

To clarify, do these issues exist on raw ALSA, or would I need to set up something like JACK for an improvement?

pulseaudio seems to do what it is supposed to do, but did have an annoyance on another computer (but that computer is gone now), what it would do is everyday it would reconfigure itself to pipe the audio to the HDMI video to my monitor, that would be great if i was using a HUGE LCD HDTV for gaming or something like that but i just have a regular 24 inch monitor without speakers in it, so everyday i would have to open the pulseaudio mixer and point the audio output back to the audio-out ports at the back of the computer

there was supposed some workarounds for this in /etc/pulseaudio/* but pulse would ignore them, probably just weird hardware

I have set the cat among the pigeons, haven't I! In the mean time, I just took Didier's advice, removed the /etc/asound.conf file and uninstalled pulseaudio. And sound still works. So it seems that I don't need the "pure" alsa library files provided in current after all.

I'm going to mark this as solved.

It might be wise to be reminded of the reason why pulseaudio was introduced in the first place; because bluez 5.x no longer supported ALSA. So, for those of us (like myself) who depend on Bluetooth for their sound have need of PA, and for those whom PA presents no problem, even though they have discrete sound cards, should not worry about its presence.

A friend of mine asked me to suggest to the Music Producers from this thread, who are worried about their audio mixer latencies on their businesses, this particular Digital Mixer:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_x_32.htm

Apparently, for only £1455 / $1850 it gives 32 channels of precise quality and latency which never will be reached by a PC, no matter what operating system it runs.

Happy Slacking hazel...and yes, one of the benefits of Slackware is the many debates and discussions one can have when you are running such a stable distro. :)

AFAIK DMix is not a default setup. However in the case of cheap and/or onboard sound devices you could be right since I never use those. I find those somewhat like the old Winmodems where hardware is gutted or crippled and must be supplanted with software. I think I qualified that as "casual listeners" for whom the convenience of PA is a plus, and serious, audiophile users for whom PA just gets in the way and at considerable loss.

You're quite welcome.

JACK is a superb, audiophile quality piece of work that does what PA does and more. It is roughly the equivalent of ASIO for Windows and is an all but essential bit of software for most serious recording work. It is not a tool of convenience like PA and more one of options like ASIO. It requires some setup but is quite intuitive and extremely powerful and eminently configurable, especially with high quality audio hardware. One of the things it emulates is a patch bay so that one can route Inputs and Outputs in many configurations, essential to serious recording work. It is also easy to employ as an on-demand feature, easily toggled on/off. So Jack isn't needed to improve ALSA, just to extend it and offer deeper control.

If you are at all interested in getting back into recording it would be very helpful to look here --- http://studioware.org/ --- for a version of Slackware dedicated to multimedia work. It does have Audacity for simple work but it also has Ardour which is more like ProTools for serious multitrack work needed for Pro and Semi-Pro work.