PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics

Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."

Comments

This is the Sound of

[Anonymous Coward]

Firrrrrsssst P Po Po sssst

Re:This is the Sound of

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the only situation that anyone says: "If it has Pulse... its dead"

Re:This is the Sound of

[Rob the Bold]

You were making a good point until you resorted to profanity, which shot you right down from the sky. Such a shame.

I think you accidentally switched on the grown-up internets today. Sometimes the people use the bad words there. It'll be OK.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Networked audio and thin unix clients ... just what I need at home! I do hope that my netbook can stream PulseAudio to my PDA!

Who knew?

[PCM2]

Lady Gaga apparently uses Linux.

Can I tell it to go away when I don't need it?

[WWWWolf]

I disagree with the original article: ALSA is the way to go, I have drivers for all cards I've thrown at it, all applications imaginable that support ALSA work just fine for me, and no, as a OSS-to-ALSA changeover survivor, I don't want to change everything to another frigging API yet again (much less back to OSS), thank you very much. And while PulseAudio is less than perfect right now, I recognise it has uses.

But that's just that - it has uses. In its current state, I'm not using it for plain-ordinary music playing on my Debian system. I don't think it's ready enough as a common day-to-day audio routing thing. Still too many problems.

An example case: I was really disappointed when I upgraded Ubuntu on an older computer (600Mhz Pentium III with 256M memory and ESS Solo 1 onboard audio, plenty good enough for OpenOffice.org and web browsing, even ran Compiz at very good performance on GeForce 2 MX =) and sound playback started to just plain suck, when it previously worked just fine with straight-up app-to-ALSA playback. The machine just wasn't fast enough to route stuff through an application, plain and simple. And now Ubuntu foisted PulseAudio in. Uninstall PulseAudio = uninstall entire frigging GNOME desktop. I kept trying to tell it "no, I just want ALSA playback" in sound settings. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning and hogging audio device all to itself. I kept disabling shit from all places imaginable. No dice, pulseaudio kept respawning. Now, I'm going insane (an unrelated story). I'll be armed with GCC and some dummy binaries. Mheheh. Muahaha. MUAHAHAHAHA. ...any better ideas?

I have a shorter guide

[jonaskoelker]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578

TL;DR. Here's a slightly shorter guide to a great pulseaudio setup on Ubuntu:

apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio

In my experience it works flawlessly ;-)

Re:Programming in general, is a lost art for Linux

[Thalaric]

Wow, you managed to hate on Alsa, Linux, Gnome, C++ and the End User all in one post. Condolulations, this may be the most faddish post I've ever seen.