Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

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On 04/20/2013 05:34 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote
> 

[snip]

>> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
>> people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
>> fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
>> category, so do many others.
> 
>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
> 
>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
> 

The sad thing is, I've not infrequently wound up with sound systems that
were *too* complex for PulseAudio to handle. At least, they were too
complex for the configuration interfaces available, and documentation
for how to do things more precisely (without writing code) was not
forthcoming.

Here's a scenario exactly as I was dealing with it around 2008:

Dodo was a combination HTPC/desktop box.[1] It had five displays and
three audio interfaces attached to it. Four of the displays sat on my
desk, one of the displays was a 32" 720p TV that served as the home
theater screen.[2] The machine was sometimes used in both roles at once.

The three audio interfaces were:

1) The onboard audio, which I sometimes used while using the box as a
workstation.
2) A USB audio device, which I used if I was chilling on the couch and
needed localized audio
3) A professional audio interface (I forget what, now) that fed my
receiver as well as a crossover that built an LFE channel.

PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted with
the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything* would
suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful routing
of different applications to different audio sources.

If I'd learned to use JACK, things probably would have been easier...but
I was using Ubuntu,[3] everything seemed designed around leveraging PA,
and I hadn't learned to discard fancy desktop environments yet.

You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
it'd work.


[1] It was also the home gateway router, too, but that's another
story...and not much of one.
[2] Incidentally, this was the same setup where I'd successfully mixed
ATI and nVidia graphics hardware. I used the nvidia proprietary drivers
and the open-source support for ATI...which admittedly wasn't much. But
that's another story.
[3] I wasn't consistently using Gentoo yet. That rather relates to the
machine doubling as the network gateway...[4]
[4] No, I wouldn't do a setup this complicated as one machine as a
keystone in the network. At least, not again.


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