[gentoo-user] Re: Phonon + PulseAudio Problem

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 05/21/2010 09:26 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Nikos Chantziaras<realnc@arcor.de>  wrote:
>> Then why does dmix lag?
>> Then why does dmix lag?
>
> I don't know; I don't care. I don't use dmix, I use PulseAudio, and it
> takes care of everything in user space and I don't have to worry about
> anything.
>
>> I've tried it 6 days ago.  Ubuntu 10.04.  It's still a laggy, buggy, pile of
>> ****.  First thing I did was to disable it.
>
> It doesn't lag here. It's rock solid stable. In all my computers, each
> one with completely different sound hardware. And I'm just using the
> ebuilds from Gentoo; I didn't configure *anything*. I didn't have to.
>
> Maybe Ubuntu has something wrong: Lennart complained that they "didn't get it":
>
> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pa-in-ubuntu.html
>
>> Yes, you and many people also find it acceptable to run their games with
>> 10FPS, or to take their systems 1 minute to boot, etc.
>
> My games doesn't run at 10FPS, my laptop boot in seconds (and usually
> it's always suspended), my desktop and media center (specially the
> latter) boot very quickly also. Please don't speak about something you
> don't know anything about.
>
>> I am not one of those people.  I don't like it when the sound lags.  You may
>> claim that it doesn't bother you.  But you can't claim that it doesn't
>> happen.
>
> I can claim it: it doesn't happen *to me*. It works beautifully. I'm
> using Gentoo, with the following versions:
>
> media-sound/pulseaudio-0.9.21.1
> sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-2.6.32.9
>
> My sound card is :
>
> 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio
> Controller (rev 03)
>
> (I'm on my laptop; don't have the specs of my desktop or media center,
> but the versions at least should be the same).
>
> I simply don't have any sound lags.
>
>> That doesn't mean ALSA is better.
>
> Again, I trust more the technical judgement from the kernel
> developers. No offense.
>
>> Then why don't they fix it?  It's still crap after all this time.
>
> It's not in my case. Not at all. But (as I said in my last mail), this
> is Open Source; if you think it's crap, you can try to fix it.
>
> All I'm saying is that PulseAudio is a great sound architecture for
> Linux. It works great for me, in several hardware configurations; and
> in particular in my Media Center, which is my principal medium to
> listen to music. And I trust the judgement of the ones that decided to
> use ALSA+PulseAudio.
>
> Regards.

All of this boils down to what you should have said in the beginning:

It works for *you*.

You don't mind the lag (there is lag, no way around it, you just don't 
mind because you're not using software that needs good latency, like 
software synthesizers) but I do.  So stop trying to convince me that it 
works for me too.  To use your own words, please don't speak about 
something you don't know anything about.  As I see it, if I have to use 
ALSA's OSS-compatibility to get acceptable results, why not use the real 
thing instead?