Re: [gentoo-user] Re: no sound on upgraded Firefox from 7 to 8 - using pulse audio

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2011 22:37:30 +0000
Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:

> > PulseAudio is to audio what X.org is to video: stream mixing
> > software.  
> 
> I see ... so for many use cases that do not require to selectively
> modify the volume of different outputs, pulseaudio is really not
> necessary at all (I can always plug/unplug an earphone jack or what
> not).  That would not make pulseaudio the default selection IMHO, but
> anyway - isn't that what jack is used for?  Is pulseaudio another
> jack application?

No, not really.

Jack is for professional applications where detail is everything.
Things like latency - it becomes a nightmare trying to deal with even
small amounts of latency when doing good quality audio mixing.

Pulseaudio is an effort to deal with current and future
trends in regular everyday usage. To borrow Claudio's example - it's
not all that uncommon these days to have external speakers, built-in
speakers, bluetooth headsets and HDMI all hook up to the same consumer
machine, all coming and going as the user plugs stuff in and out. The
user wants it all to JustWork nicely. This is a quite different thing
from what jack set out to solve.

Of course whether jack, alsa, pulseaudio, oss or oss4 succeeded in
solving any of these things is a debate for another time, let's rather
just stick to design goals for now :-)


-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com