[gentoo-user] gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[gentoo-user] gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[covici]

Hi.  I am upgrading gnome to gnome3 and I find that at least
gnome-control-center wants pulseaudio, but I hate pulseaudio and, if
possible, don't want to install it at all.  I did configure
package.provided to not compile, but gnome-control-center seems to
require it.  Anyway to get around this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com

[gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[walt]

On 01/24/2012 01:14 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> Hi.  I am upgrading gnome to gnome3 and I find that at least
> gnome-control-center wants pulseaudio, but I hate pulseaudio and, if
> possible, don't want to install it at all.  I did configure
> package.provided to not compile, but gnome-control-center seems to
> require it.  Anyway to get around this?

I feel the same, and I've started using xfce4 instead of gnome3 because
they don't require any sound daemon (yet) and the new gnome-shell won't
run on my old video hardware anyway.

I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for clues
about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.  There are no
config options to enable or disable pulse, so it appears that pulse is
here to stay in gnome3.

<oldfart>
I doubt that one in a hundred computer users would know how to use pulse
to fix sound problems even *if* pulse is the right solution.  A long way
yet to go before pulse will be anything but a curse to me :(
</oldfart>

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[covici]

walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/24/2012 01:14 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > Hi.  I am upgrading gnome to gnome3 and I find that at least
> > gnome-control-center wants pulseaudio, but I hate pulseaudio and, if
> > possible, don't want to install it at all.  I did configure
> > package.provided to not compile, but gnome-control-center seems to
> > require it.  Anyway to get around this?
> 
> I feel the same, and I've started using xfce4 instead of gnome3 because
> they don't require any sound daemon (yet) and the new gnome-shell won't
> run on my old video hardware anyway.
> 
> I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for clues
> about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.  There are no
> config options to enable or disable pulse, so it appears that pulse is
> here to stay in gnome3.
> 
> <oldfart>
> I doubt that one in a hundred computer users would know how to use pulse
> to fix sound problems even *if* pulse is the right solution.  A long way
> yet to go before pulse will be anything but a curse to me :(
> </oldfart>
> 
Yep, I agree.  So what would happen if I installed pulse and just didn't
start the thing, what would I lose then?

Seems like a waste of disk space to me.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com

[gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[walt]

On 01/24/2012 10:52 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for clues
>> about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.

> So what would happen if I installed pulse and just didn't
> start the thing, what would I lose then?

I tried that and found that the gnome applet for controlling the volume
and mixer controls won't work without pulse.  You can use some other app
to change the volume, I suppose, but I didn't bother to try it.  Seems
like a losing battle in the long run.  Maybe if we wait long enough pulse
will actually become useful to ordinary everyday users.

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[covici]

walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/24/2012 10:52 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for clues
> >> about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.
> 
> > So what would happen if I installed pulse and just didn't
> > start the thing, what would I lose then?
> 
> I tried that and found that the gnome applet for controlling the volume
> and mixer controls won't work without pulse.  You can use some other app
> to change the volume, I suppose, but I didn't bother to try it.  Seems
> like a losing battle in the long run.  Maybe if we wait long enough pulse
> will actually become useful to ordinary everyday users.
> 

I can use amixer to change the volume, so that is fine with me.

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 05:24:46 -0800
walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/24/2012 10:52 PM, covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >> I just scanned through the gnome-control-center code looking for
> >> clues about pulse and found no sign that pulse is voluntary.
> 
> > So what would happen if I installed pulse and just didn't
> > start the thing, what would I lose then?
> 
> I tried that and found that the gnome applet for controlling the
> volume and mixer controls won't work without pulse.  You can use some
> other app to change the volume, I suppose, but I didn't bother to try
> it.  Seems like a losing battle in the long run.  Maybe if we wait
> long enough pulse will actually become useful to ordinary everyday
> users.


Why do you say that? (Serious question, I'm not jerking your chain)

I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that. It's similar in a
way to the rise of desktop environments in the past - instead of a
bunch of isolated apps all doing their own thing independantly, systems
like KDE created an environment where apps interacted nicely and
all needed to plug into the same bus. Whether that goal was properly
accomplished or not is a different debate :-)

If a simpler desktop is your thing and you actually prefer *Box|XFCE or
such then you have no need of pulse audio and that's OK. I just curious
why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary user in a generic
wide way.


-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Walter Dnes]

  An answer from a different Walter <G>...

> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.

[...deletia...]

> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
> user in a generic wide way.

  I'll throw the question back to you.  What specific benefits do you
see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.  Sound
daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem.  And if
they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new ones
of their own.  I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was all the
weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG (Toronto area
linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again after installing
pulseaudio.

  Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.  Nuff said.  The
thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.  Try
listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 8:08 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>  An answer from a different Walter <G>...
>
>> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
>> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
>> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
>> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
>> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.
>
> [...deletia...]
>
>> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
>> user in a generic wide way.
>
>  I'll throw the question back to you.  What specific benefits do you
> see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.

Debugging. I know which app sounds comes from, in the event that it's
ambiguous. I know whether or not I need to adjust the sound settings
within an app based on the per-app volume menu.

Mixing. Yes, I understand there's dmix. There's no obvious interface
to control per-app mixing levels. Where an app doesn't offer
individual volume control, that's sometimes useful.

These are real-life benefits for users. Maybe not you. *Nobody* can
tell you that PA is right for you, because you've rejected it and
because you're satisfied with what you have. If what you have works
for you, great. Honestly, a pure-ALSA configuration works for me right
now. Some times, it hasn't, and I've used PA at those times.

>  Sound
> daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem.  And if
> they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new ones
> of their own.  I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was all the
> weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG (Toronto area
> linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again after installing
> pulseaudio.
>
>  Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.  Nuff said.  The
> thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.  Try
> listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean.

Or play a game with sound effects and music at the same time, and see
that mixing exists for a reason. (And then turn off the in-game music
and play something appropriate.)

-- 
:wq

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:08:26 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:

>   Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.  Nuff said.  The
> thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.

Have you ever been talking to someone when the fire alarm went off? Then
you'd realise we can multitask audio. Imagine if your ears decided not to
tell you about the alarm, because you were deep in conversation. That
used to be a problem and the reason we needed sound daemons. The reason
aRTS expired is that ALSA gained software mixing capabilities and a
separate daemon was no longer needed.

Pulseaudio has some interesting applications, such as being to control
settings on a per application basis, your audio player can use the
speakers while your VOIP program can use a bluetooth headset if paired.
At the moment it is too messy and troublesome to bother with, but one day
I hope we will get a decent sound control system. However, I know in my
heart that is also the day we will be told it is no longer enough and we
have to have a new system.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = - @B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t,"
and there was light.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:08:26 -0500
"Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:

>   An answer from a different Walter <G>...
> 
> > I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but
> > looking over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt
> > to deal with audio properly for the future. These days we have
> > computers and devices that can interact with many other things in
> > weird and wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.
> 
> [...deletia...]
> 
> > I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
> > user in a generic wide way.
> 
>   I'll throw the question back to you.  

How about you go first?

I'm not opening up a debate and preparing an argument, I really want to
know what you think about this matter.

Yeah, I know, this is a highly unusual thing for Alan to put out there
and I've never done it this way before :-)

But it's legit, I don't have a dog in this fight and would really like
to know what you think




> What specific benefits do you
> see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.  Sound
> daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem.  And
> if they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new
> ones of their own.  I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was
> all the weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG
> (Toronto area linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again
> after installing pulseaudio.
> 
>   Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.  Nuff said.  The
> thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.
> Try listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean.
> 



-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>  An answer from a different Walter <G>...
>
>> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
>> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
>> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
>> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
>> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.
>
> [...deletia...]
>
>> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
>> user in a generic wide way.
>
>  I'll throw the question back to you.  What specific benefits do you
> see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.

Bluetooth headset,configured with two or three clicks of a mouse. And
then reroute the sound of Skype (or whatever app) to the headset while
nice background music still plays on the speakers.

> Sound
> daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem.  And if
> they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new ones
> of their own.  I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was all the
> weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG (Toronto area
> linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again after installing
> pulseaudio.

Have you tried PulseAudio lately? I haven't heard complains in a long time.

>  Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.

Yeah, because they sucked. Pulse doesn't (haven't in a long time;
almost all the complains were made years ago). The architecture of esd
and aRts was wrong from the beginning; not necessarily the fault of
the devs, they were the first tries at a sound daemon. Pulse (which
was PolypAudio before) learn from those mistakes and then it had its
own set of evolving pains (that's when a lot of people, specially
using distributions packaging before time, complained about it).

HAL was different; it was to please the "lets be portable" crowd.
IMHO, it was doomed from the beginning.

>  Nuff said.  The
> thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.  Try
> listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean.

Well, I talk with Skype and listen to background music all the time
(see above). And kids these days seem to be able to handle more data
streams at the same time; just some days ago I saw a 15yo cousin of
mine chatting on Skype while she heard background music *and* watched
and listened to a music video on YouTube.

Maybe this shiny new stuff is not for the old guys like us. But I
certainly like it; I love my blueetooth headset, and it "just works"
with PulseAudio and Bluez (and GNOME on top of them).

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[pk]

On 2012-01-26 12:22, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> I'm not opening up a debate and preparing an argument, I really want to
> know what you think about this matter.

I apologize for "butting" in...

Here's what *I* think about it (well, this is not about Pulseaudio
specifically but I'm sure you'll get the idea):
https://groups.google.com/group/linux.gentoo.user/msg/6bbe9d07876c92f5

To be clear:
If I ever need something then it should be *complementary* to what I
already have.

It can also be noted that Pulseaudio will not even utilise the hardware
I own to it's fullest:
https://tango.0pointer.de/pipermail/pulseaudio-discuss/2009-July/004519.html

If I would ever need a sound router I would check out Jack but that
requires a bit of "fiddling" as I understand it.

Best regards

Peter K

[gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[walt]

On 01/26/2012 08:55 AM, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> wrote:
>>  An answer from a different Walter <G>...
>>
>>> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
>>> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
>>> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
>>> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
>>> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.
>>
>> [...deletia...]
>>
>>> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
>>> user in a generic wide way.
>>
>>  I'll throw the question back to you.  What specific benefits do you
>> see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.
> 
> Bluetooth headset,configured with two or three clicks of a mouse. And
> then reroute the sound of Skype (or whatever app) to the headset while
> nice background music still plays on the speakers.

Alan, this was what I was thinking when I wrote "useful to everyday ordinary
users", though it will never be useful to me.

The first thing I do when I hear any sound coming from a new app is do
whatever I need to do to make the fscking thing STFU.  And talking on
the phone with music playing would drive me crazy in seconds.  And I
would have to strangle any child playing a noisy game and listening to
music at the same time.  Or even separately.

So you can see I'm not the demographic the pulse devs are targeting :)