On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wednesday 07 Dec 2011 00:16:31 Claudio Roberto França Pereira wrote:
> The idea behind pulseaudio is live switching of streams. ALSA is great
> if you have only one audio card, but as soon as you introduce a
> bluetooth headset, a headphone, a HDMI display with sound output, ALSA
> can't handle real time stream redirection. Sure, you can use scripts
> to toggle .asoundrc profiles, but even then you'll need to restart the
> softwares that produce audio.
> Here I have a HDMI display (an hdtv) and a headphone. I mostly send my
> audio to my tv, but if I'm using the computer late at night, or if I'm
> to listen to high volume music, I'd switch the affecting streams to my
> headphone, without the need to mess with sound configuration files and
> to restart my sound engine.
>
> 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?
--
Regards,
Mick


Now I've got another problem: how to revert back to simple alsa...

Thanks!
Francisco

--
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw