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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."
Now the problem is the people and the distros installing it by default on a desktop where it is utterly useless.
In fact it's worse than useless (on Ubuntu): whenever I move away from my wireless access point at home (i.e. I'm on my bike on my way to the university), my sound stutters; this is probably PulseAudio spending too much time on making a new map of the network and too little time on actually handling sound waves (but I'm speculating).
Did no one test this? Am I the only person using a "ThinkPod" as a portable music player? Oh, I guess it's not one of those 95% most common use cases, so it's no biggie if it isn't handled properly.
Except that there are twenty disjoint chunks of 5% least common use cases not being fixed because they don't affect that many people, except everyone is affected by one... grr... </hyperbole> <apology/>
It's actually extremely difficult to do a reliable sound system. The drivers for a large number of cards are pretty bad.
From what I understand up until recently most OS' treated sound cards like any other hardware. If you got a bad response from them, the OS would halt the system rather than risk physical damage. Hence sound cards are one of the leading causes of blue screens in windows 9x and XP.
One of the things Vista did right was recognise that drivers for sound cards can't be trusted and put in an additional software layer between the hardware and drivers to minimise sound card related blue screens. It's why Directsound has been removed from DX and one of the biggest reasons DX10 can't run on XP.
I'm also slightly disturbed by his attitude to other operating systems than just Linux. For example, this post on the OpenSolaris mailing list.
Comments such as the following:
Then, "Unix Admin" asked mumbled something about whether we might want to install Solaris on my machines. Thanks, but no thanks. I already got a good operating system, which is called "Fedora", and its audio system is what I am payed to work on by Red Hat.
As mentioned above, we have been adopted by all relevant Linux distributions. There's not much left we could win in Free Software land, except maybe that little OS that starts with "Slow" and ends with "aris". ;-)
appear somewhat unprofessional for someone who is being paid for the development he is doing, and for someone on whom the future of Unix/Linux audio has been entrusted.
"OSS is outdated and has its limitations. "
OSS3 was proprietary, it had limitations, and it sucked.
In today's world, OSS4 is open source, it is actively being developed, and it WORKS! See my post above. I can have three virtual machines open, all of them playing sound, and go back to the host machine, and play music there. No sizzle, no popping, no waiting for buffers.
OSS4. I don't understand why more people haven't discovered it yet. If the idea of compiling scares you, don't mess with it - but I really thought the majority of Linux systems could figure it out.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And even if it doesn't actually damage anything, amplification can cause clipping. On the other hand, many sources really are too quiet and don't fully exploit the available dynamic range, so having a way to increase sound volume up to the point where you'd start overdriving the hardware would be nice. But that appears to be beyond the state of the art for online algorithms. (Offline, people have been normalizing volume for years.)