At one time I had ALSA working on my 14.2, but it took a good deal of fiddling with things here and there and it left my system kind of ratty feeling instead of nice and smooth with my usual normal installs of Slackware. So, instead of doing what I was planning on doing when 14.2 came out - to use my 1TB hdd as pure storage for things like my huge music files directory, movies (all my bought dvd's I put on my computer instead and then give the dvd's away to friends so I don't have to worry about storage for them, which I have no space for) etc - I kept 14.1 on it and when I want to listen to my music or movies and hear it the way it's supposed to sound and have the control over how I want it to sound, I just reboot into my 14.1 hdd, and leave the 14.2 hdd with the PA junk behind.

This thread, as the others about getting PA off ones system and ALSA back on and running correctly, is proof it really *isn't* so simple (plus my own experience doing so) and is too much a PITA. Do the separate hdd thing and life will be happier, IMHO.

That's a bit strange way to put it. You're saying 14.1 sounds better? And 14.2 is ratty without pulseaudio? Why not just use 14.1? Maybe you are not done setting up 14.2 to be to your preferences?

It probably took me about an hour to reverse the build configuration of 14.2 to back to a 14.1 configuration without pulseaudio. Just the fact that 14.1 ever existed with the same apps shows it's possible. And it is easy. I've gone through it on several machines now. The fact I remember so little on what needs to be done shows there really isn't anything special about it. Also, the changelog is not really a good place to start. Most of those applications rebuilt for pulse dlopen the thing. It's a waste of time.

It isn't a matter of putting alsa back on. Alsa is already on. Alsa is what produces the sound. PA is just a daemon, it doesn't produce any audio output. And the whole process of getting rid of PA takes less than an hour. Actually, much less. It also takes zero effort to get alsa working again.

threads like remove PulseAudio, or no PAM because complexity, and others which names I do not mention here, are always an inspiration in obscurity. thanks, YMMD.
And while reading this, I am happily switching the sound on my Slackware notebook from wirless USB speaker to HDMI or the notbook speaker in best quality without any problem or interruption. It just works, as is should be.

Might as well dump my personal notes on the matter here:

To be honest, it's quite easy to remove pulseaudio in Slackware without using the awkward method in the wiki. Didn't think a lot of people struggled with it so.
Do note that a bunch of prebuilt packages might link with libpulse and might require rebuilding and/or modification of their SlackBuilds. As I don't use prebuilt packages outside of the base distribution it doesn't really matter for me.

EDIT: Also, consider adding something like this to your rc.local_shutdown if you want your volume level to be saved across reboots:

I have an i5 computer with an Intel brand mother board and 14.1 Alsa has always worked fine. Jump to 14.2 and pulse audio has just been a nightmare. Its un-usable on my computer for some reason.

* Compared to 14.1 Alsa, pulse audio has HALF the volume. The output is just incredibly weak.

* And alot times its distorted (even though its weak). Playing youtube videos changes the volume to 50%. Even if I set it to 100% - just clicking on the video progress bar to back it up will change it back to 50%.

* The sound quality is really bad compared to Alsa. Its a completely different "sound" than with Alsa. Alsa was full and rich. Pulse audio is a tin can sound.

* With Alsa I had 10+ controls for different aspects of my sound card with Pulse I have only headphone and line. And if either the Line or Headphone gets unplugged or is not plugged in at boot, then there's no sound by just plugging them in. I have to reboot with the headphones / line plugged in in order for it to work.

This may sound like a rant but its not. These are facts of life on my computer. Apparently nobody else is having these issues. I've never had sound problems before.

-----------------------
Update: Ok this is a bit unbelievable to me. All I did was go into /etc/asound.conf and comment out the 2 lines
#pcm.default pulse
#ctl.default pulse

And reboot. Alsa is back. The sound level blew me out of my chair, not distorted, full rich sound again and clicking on youtube videos & video progress bars doesn't change the sound.

Well, good for me.

Those problems seem familiar to me, so I wouldn't say that. On my primary machine, I still use an el cheapo sound card that is 17 years old. The loss of capability with pulseaudio on that is clearly discernible, and I don't consider myself an audiophile. And removing nearly all user control of the device that works well as it was originally intended is bizarre. Maybe there are really some bad DACs out-there that warrant full software control like this, but since they seem to be rather rare in my collection, it seems to be rather poor choice to abstract audio so much for the rare device. My theory is they are just following the lead of some other OS's concept of "user-is-dumb" interfacing.

Perhaps generally, the sound quality can't be affected if ALSA is in charge, and used directly. Pulseaudio can still be launched, and used by apps though, and that can be a concern of a different level.

I've had all sorts of similar problems with pulseaudio and even worse (su - killing sound in other distros) enough to sour my experience to not follow Slackware's lead in in adding it to my system. If it works for others fine, but its not for me. :)

My 78 year old mother lives out in the woods and brown/black outs happen quite often. I've got a cheap UPS on her 14.2 system to shut it down, but the problem with sound begins when she's started her system back up and wants to listen to news videos or videos sent to her in her e-mail by friends.

She can't. Her system for some reason, always starts up with no sound. She has to go into system settings and adjust things to make sound work again. This happens *EVERY* time she has to restart her system. It's a PITA and I've not been able to figure out why it's doing this or how to make it stop and just give her the sound so she doesn't have to keep piddling with this problem. It'll be soon she'll tell me to put Microshaft back on her system and I'll have to argue with her for days and weeks on end why it's a stupid idea to do that.

Not once in my several years of using Slackware and the years of other distro's before it between 2000 and then, has alsa never 'not' worked.

It's kind of a Catch-22, unfortunately, because I personally (nor anyone I know) use anything to do with bluetooth, but I do know there are some out there who do. I think it may boil down to 'which is more important'...good, decent sound that works all the time every time (alsa), or bluetooth for ?.

I'm not quite clear with what you are saying. Are you saying that pulseaudio is not saving the audio level across boots? Maybe it is auto muting during modprobing or udev events of the sound devices. There is probably a reason. I agree about Alsa when it comes to something like this.

I've not been a fan of anything from whatishisname, but pulse works. I've done several fresh, from scratch installations since pulseaudio was added to Slackware and to date there have not been any audio problems. There has been no need to even look at the audio configuration. It just works.

Depends on your usage. I've found a number of situations that break it, but if you only ever login on one X desktop at a time and just use it from a single user account you'll never encounter them (unless you're very unlucky).

It's not saving sound at all. I have to go to system settings, and in multimedia, then hardwarre tab, change it from some hdmi garbage to 'builtin audio' and then change from 'headphnes' to 'line out', and then she'll have sound again. Every single time her system has to be restarted for whatever reason this has to be done. It's simply a PITA for me to do it for her when I'm here, imagine what it's like for someone 78 years of age who is slowly having a harder and harder time remembering how to do things like those steps on her own when I'm not here.

Possible solution from the Arch forums:

edit /etc/pulse/default.pa to comment out the line:

#load-module module-switch-on-port-available

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=207868

Another possible solution: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...tel_sound_card

I strongly disagree with the idea of removing Pulseaudio, especially because of issues that could be solved without removing it, or with a rationale like "I was happy with what I had before, why change?", or "I don't want to learn something new" or even worse "I don't want to use a software initially written by LP".

It would be way more constructive to properly document issues as they occur and try collectively to find solutions. That's one of the main aims of LQ, after all.

Let me remind you that there are available sources of information to help manage Pulseaudio and troubleshoot issues, like on ArchWiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...roubleshooting

There is also a page on SlackDocs.
PA was not yet shipped in Slackware when it has been written but I assume that proposed updates including e.g. advice for a proper setup or solutions to common issues encountered using PA in Slackware would be welcome.

Last, as PA 10.0 has been released it wouldn't be bad to check if it solves some issues, see the release notes: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...io/Notes/10.0/

End or rant, thanks for reading.