"If I wanted to wear a headset, I'd work for a phone bank, but then I'd have to kill myself. I went to grad school and got a PhD because I didn't want to work in a phone bank. So why would I want to wear the accouterments thereof?"
You seem to be labouring under the misconception that anyone gives a flying shit what _you_ do. Use Bluetooth, don't use Bluetooth, we don't care. The point is that many people _do_ use Bluetooth, and "I don't use it so I don't have to care" is not a valid argument why their needs should not be taken account of.
"For the mundane user, ALSA was doing fine before Pulse came along."
Really? Were you on any user support lists or forums before PA became widespread? How many people did you explain how to set a default sound card to? "Well, first you need to find out what kernel drivers your cards use. Then you need to edit/etc/modprobe.conf and set the index=0 parameter for one of the modules, and index=1 for the other. Oh, both your cards use the same module? Then you're screwed, sorry." Ahh, those were the days...
(and yes, lots and lots of 'mundane users' have more than one sound device.)
er, it's there and in active use by zillions of applications across multiple problems. but it lives at a higher level of the stack. gstreamer *outputs* to PulseAudio. (or, y'know, ALSA, if PA isn't there.) gstreamer wasn't designed to do the stuff PA does, that's not its job.
"PulseAudio can't even get that right. Stutters and skips are the norm, audio systems that worked previously no longer do, and the backers of this abomination are in abject denial about it."
If you care about audio latency you should be running a suitable sound server (yes, sound server). Namely, JACK. There are several custom distros available for audio creation purposes which come with a decent JACK setup and collection of appropriate applications out of the box. Running one of those would appear to be the sensible option.
Typical use of general-purpose Linux distributions, however, does not involve serious audio creation (the main use case which actually cares about latency). Hence it doesn't make much sense to prioritize latency over reliability or power usage in a general-purpose Linux distribution's default configuration.
"If they didn't, they could only have one application at a time play sound unless they had one of those relatively rare sound cards that had both hardware mixing and Linux support."
Well, to nitpick, this isn't true. ALSA has software mixing support courtesy of dmix, on almost all cards, and most distros used it by default for some time before PA use became widespread.
right, because obviously it's completely pointless to identify where the problem lies before trying to fix it. Lennart's definitely saying 'the bug is in the kernel so let's not fix it', that's absolutely his position. It would make far more sense for us to say 'I don't CARE if the bug's in the kernel, go fix it in PulseAudio!' That would be a great way to write sensible and reliable software.
Or, wait, we could accurately identify when the bugs are in the kernel and then _fix them in the freaking kernel_, just like Lennart and Jaroslav (Red Hat's kernel audio developer) are doing. That would just be crazy, though. It'd never work.
"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."
Nope, not plain and simple. As I noted in other comments, this is due to resampling (it wouldn't happen if the audio in question didn't need to be resampled). The default resampling algorithm is chosen to give good quality on the vast majority of hardware (this is a polite way of saying you could pick a better system out of any given city dumpster:>). If you're running on extremely slow hardware, you can change the default resampling method with a fairly simple configuration file edit:
"most of the time, however, the issue is there only with pulseaudio. my machine works like a charm without it and stutter with - the developer will have an hard time convincing me that the bug is not in his software, as alsa and arts had never had a problem previously."
if only things were that simple. However, they aren't. Most stuttering issues observed with PA are indeed caused by kernel driver bugs. PA uses more of the ALSA API - the *public* ALSA API, which is exactly what other apps are allowed to use and which is supposed to work - than most previous applications have done. Hence PA exposes bugs in ALSA which have been present but unnoticed until someone came along and actually tried to _use_ the functions in question. This is the case with almost all of the stuttering issues. Most of them have been fixed by ALSA driver fixes in recent ALSA / kernel releases. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_PulseAudio#Playback_problems.2C_crackling_or_skipping for a workaround.
http://developer.opensound.com/opensource_oss/licensing.html: "Q: Is everything in OSS open sourced? A: No. There are three drivers that have mosty been written by the hardware manufacturers. We are not permitted to release their sources unless their authors as us to do so..."
For a second, it has absolutely no chance of being merged into the kernel as written, hence little chance of being adopted by any major distribution.
Your definition of 'totally ignored' is an interesting one:
"Comment #6 From Lennart Poettering (lpoetter@redhat.com) 2009-08-19 11:29:50 EDT (-) [reply] ------- Private
Nate, please file seperate bugs about seperate issues.
Please file your bug #1 against gnome-media.
Your bug #2 is probably a duplicate of bug 506075.
Your bug #3 is probably fixed in F12. We changed the mapping between percent/pixels and actual dB to make it more natural.
Please file your bug #4 against rhythmbox.
Your bug #5 is already filed.
I will ignore all other issues mentioned in comments here.
So please: seperate issues need to be posted in seperate bugs. And dn't hijack bug reports by adding comments unrelated to the original topic. Thanks.
I will close this now."
Man, if that's being totally ignored, cut me a slice.
you are aware you can quite easily configure an app to output direct to ALSA even if an instance of PA is running, right? Or you can, trivially on any distribution, disable the default routing of ALSA output to the PA daemon?
the only reason that '99% of the answers will be "uninstall PulseAudio".' is that people are idiots. The correct answer is to learn how to configure your system properly. Yes, I know, you learned Unix at your mother's knee 50 years ago and you hate anything that changes anything you knew back then, yadda yadda, whine fucking whine.
Women in the world: 55%. Women in commercial software development: figures vary, but somewhere from 10% to 35%. Women in F/OSS volunteer development: 1% to 3%.
suuuuure, F/OSS doesn't have its own particular problems.
"If you were trying to the think of the most expensive games to play, Rock Band or a monthly-fee MMORPG would come to mind"
I would suggest Wangan Midnight, any Gundam game, ITG, GuitarFreaks/Drummania...any game that anyone in a West Coast city with a decent Asian-style arcade can see people playing for hours at a time, day in and day out. Usually at a buck a game.
I've probably spent easily north of $5,000 on Drummania in the last three years...
"'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'"
Right, because those dumb Iranians couldn't possibly know anything until POTUS tells 'em about it. Obama will just do a two minute webcast on how many great jobs are available in the American auto industry, bookended by lolcats, and the government will fall!
"Other thing I love is how the 3G support is amazing. No more messing around with ppp or weird vodafone apps, just plug the dongle in, pick your network and go. Really smooth."
"How would the fact that divorcees didn't remarry vs. they do remarry (and re-divorce) nowadays, change the percentage of divorced marriages? Honest question, don't attack me; I ran the logic in my head and it just comes out the same percentage, as long as a given marriage has the same likelyhood to end up in divorce."
Reduce the numbers and it becomes obvious.
Say we have two faithful couples and two pairs of serial divorcees.
In the Olden Days case, we'd have a 50% marriage success rate: there'd be four total marriages, two successful, two ending in divorce.
In the Modern Days case, we'd get more marriages, because the serial divorcees would remarry. Let's say both pairs of serial divorcees switch partners and re-marry, then get divorced again.
Result: two extra marriages, for a total of six, but still only two successful ones. So our success rate goes down to 33%, even though we have the same numbers of "happily ever afters" and "Zsa Zsa Gabors".
Classic journalistic sleight-of-hand: the author interchanges the two entirely different issues of speed and likelihood of injury throughout. I can believe running shoes don't make you less likely to get injured - I've never actually seen any shoe advertising that claim they *do*, though - but they certainly do make you faster.
Yes, lots of top Mexican and Kenyan runners grow up running barefoot. A few have even run and competed well in Grands Prix barefoot. But I'm not aware of any of them who didn't then go on to run *faster* while wearing running shoes.
Yes, Bannister ran the four minute mile wearing thin leather pumps. Now we have running shoes, what times are we running for the mile again?
(Of course there's lots of factors there, but I'd bet a large amount of money the mark wouldn't magically get lowered if the current holder started running barefoot).
So, yes, running shoes probably don't make you any less likely to get injured, but they do make you go faster. Of course, running's a bloody stupid way to exercise anyway. Doesn't do anything for half of your body and beats the crap out of your feet and knees. Go swimming instead. It's a better workout and far less likely to cause injury. I remember the (probably apocryphal) story of a patient asking his doctor if he'd recommend jogging as a form of exercise. "The only time I jog," says the doctor, "is when I'm late for the funeral of a patient who jogged"...
Note to those comparing on the basis of the current U.S. rail system: don't, because it's crap.
For e.g., Josh proposes linking San Francisco, L.A., Seattle and Portland...well hey, they're already connected. Have been for near a century, by the line / train now called the Coast Starlight. It's a beautiful journey from Seattle to L.A. through all the major (and some not so major) towns on the way, the ride is pleasant, the scenery is incredible...and it takes 26 frickin' hours. (I still prefer that to flying, but I'm in a minority there). That's because it's running on tracks that haven't been upgraded, it feels like, since 1926, using trains from 1963 through stations from 1886. It never gets past sixty miles an hour.
A proper Japanese- or European-style high-speed rail network would do *the whole trip* in, oh, seven or eight hours, maybe. Meaning many of the useful internal trips would be 2-3 hours. That'd be huge.
I would really, really love for the U.S. to build this, and for similar upgrades in Canada. I like to travel and I frickin' hate airlines, it would be so nice to have a pleasant, civilized way to cover this continent.
I always liked the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue joke about the first telephone. They were doing famous people's answerphone messages. Here's Alexander Bell's:
"Hello, this is Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first telephone. If you've invented another telephone, please leave a message after the beep."
"It's not so much reading to your own son, but should libraries now have to pay twice because, shockers, they often have reading programs for kids where a librarian will sit down and read a book to a dozen kids. Heck, what about the classroom, where teachers will read to twenty kids. What about book clubs?"
Given that this has been going on for years and the authors' guild hasn't made the smallest squeak of protest, I would say...no. The guy has a perfectly reasonable point. Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there. What's wrong with that? All they need to do is increase the ebook licensing fee in respect of the problem, or something, and that's all the AG is asking for. They've never said at any point that they're going to go out and start suing people.
I think Engadget's write-up of this was far more sensible. The way this story was written here is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I wanted to wear a headset, I'd work for a phone bank, but then I'd have to kill myself. I went to grad school and got a PhD because I didn't want to work in a phone bank. So why would I want to wear the accouterments thereof?"
You seem to be labouring under the misconception that anyone gives a flying shit what _you_ do. Use Bluetooth, don't use Bluetooth, we don't care. The point is that many people _do_ use Bluetooth, and "I don't use it so I don't have to care" is not a valid argument why their needs should not be taken account of.
"For the mundane user, ALSA was doing fine before Pulse came along."
Really? Were you on any user support lists or forums before PA became widespread? How many people did you explain how to set a default sound card to? "Well, first you need to find out what kernel drivers your cards use. Then you need to edit /etc/modprobe.conf and set the index=0 parameter for one of the modules, and index=1 for the other. Oh, both your cards use the same module? Then you're screwed, sorry." Ahh, those were the days...
(and yes, lots and lots of 'mundane users' have more than one sound device.)
"Whatever happened to GStreamer?"
er, it's there and in active use by zillions of applications across multiple problems. but it lives at a higher level of the stack. gstreamer *outputs* to PulseAudio. (or, y'know, ALSA, if PA isn't there.) gstreamer wasn't designed to do the stuff PA does, that's not its job.
"PulseAudio can't even get that right. Stutters and skips are the norm, audio systems that worked previously no longer do, and the backers of this abomination are in abject denial about it."
Where 'abject denial' is defined as documenting the issues and workarounds - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_PulseAudio#Playback_problems.2C_crackling_or_skipping - and fixing them (most of the issues of this kind were fixed by kernel fixes in the last six months)? Wow, it's like a whole new vocabulary world out here.
If you care about audio latency you should be running a suitable sound server (yes, sound server). Namely, JACK. There are several custom distros available for audio creation purposes which come with a decent JACK setup and collection of appropriate applications out of the box. Running one of those would appear to be the sensible option.
Typical use of general-purpose Linux distributions, however, does not involve serious audio creation (the main use case which actually cares about latency). Hence it doesn't make much sense to prioritize latency over reliability or power usage in a general-purpose Linux distribution's default configuration.
"If they didn't, they could only have one application at a time play sound unless they had one of those relatively rare sound cards that had both hardware mixing and Linux support."
Well, to nitpick, this isn't true. ALSA has software mixing support courtesy of dmix, on almost all cards, and most distros used it by default for some time before PA use became widespread.
"We need one Audio driver frame work: ALSA. We need one game abstraction layer. SDL."
Good thing PA isn't an audio driver framework or a game abstraction layer then, really, isn't it?
right, because obviously it's completely pointless to identify where the problem lies before trying to fix it. Lennart's definitely saying 'the bug is in the kernel so let's not fix it', that's absolutely his position. It would make far more sense for us to say 'I don't CARE if the bug's in the kernel, go fix it in PulseAudio!' That would be a great way to write sensible and reliable software.
Or, wait, we could accurately identify when the bugs are in the kernel and then _fix them in the freaking kernel_, just like Lennart and Jaroslav (Red Hat's kernel audio developer) are doing. That would just be crazy, though. It'd never work.
"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."
Nope, not plain and simple. As I noted in other comments, this is due to resampling (it wouldn't happen if the audio in question didn't need to be resampled). The default resampling algorithm is chosen to give good quality on the vast majority of hardware (this is a polite way of saying you could pick a better system out of any given city dumpster :>). If you're running on extremely slow hardware, you can change the default resampling method with a fairly simple configuration file edit:
http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=PulseAudio#PulseAudio
"most of the time, however, the issue is there only with pulseaudio. my machine works like a charm without it and stutter with - the developer will have an hard time convincing me that the bug is not in his software, as alsa and arts had never had a problem previously."
if only things were that simple. However, they aren't. Most stuttering issues observed with PA are indeed caused by kernel driver bugs. PA uses more of the ALSA API - the *public* ALSA API, which is exactly what other apps are allowed to use and which is supposed to work - than most previous applications have done. Hence PA exposes bugs in ALSA which have been present but unnoticed until someone came along and actually tried to _use_ the functions in question. This is the case with almost all of the stuttering issues. Most of them have been fixed by ALSA driver fixes in recent ALSA / kernel releases. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bug_info_PulseAudio#Playback_problems.2C_crackling_or_skipping for a workaround.
For a start, it's not open source:
http://developer.opensound.com/opensource_oss/licensing.html: "Q: Is everything in OSS open sourced? A: No. There are three drivers that have mosty been written by the hardware manufacturers. We are not permitted to release their sources unless their authors as us to do so..."
For a second, it has absolutely no chance of being merged into the kernel as written, hence little chance of being adopted by any major distribution.
Your definition of 'totally ignored' is an interesting one: "Comment #6 From Lennart Poettering (lpoetter@redhat.com) 2009-08-19 11:29:50 EDT (-) [reply] ------- Private Nate, please file seperate bugs about seperate issues. Please file your bug #1 against gnome-media. Your bug #2 is probably a duplicate of bug 506075. Your bug #3 is probably fixed in F12. We changed the mapping between percent/pixels and actual dB to make it more natural. Please file your bug #4 against rhythmbox. Your bug #5 is already filed. I will ignore all other issues mentioned in comments here. So please: seperate issues need to be posted in seperate bugs. And dn't hijack bug reports by adding comments unrelated to the original topic. Thanks. I will close this now." Man, if that's being totally ignored, cut me a slice.
you are aware you can quite easily configure an app to output direct to ALSA even if an instance of PA is running, right? Or you can, trivially on any distribution, disable the default routing of ALSA output to the PA daemon?
the only reason that '99% of the answers will be "uninstall PulseAudio".' is that people are idiots. The correct answer is to learn how to configure your system properly. Yes, I know, you learned Unix at your mother's knee 50 years ago and you hate anything that changes anything you knew back then, yadda yadda, whine fucking whine.
carewolf: ah, so sane volume control, device switching, Bluetooth audio support and more are useless on the desktop? I see what you're saying.
Women in the world: 55%. Women in commercial software development: figures vary, but somewhere from 10% to 35%. Women in F/OSS volunteer development: 1% to 3%.
suuuuure, F/OSS doesn't have its own particular problems.
"If you were trying to the think of the most expensive games to play, Rock Band or a monthly-fee MMORPG would come to mind" I would suggest Wangan Midnight, any Gundam game, ITG, GuitarFreaks/Drummania...any game that anyone in a West Coast city with a decent Asian-style arcade can see people playing for hours at a time, day in and day out. Usually at a buck a game. I've probably spent easily north of $5,000 on Drummania in the last three years...
It's a marketing number. "20 Second Boot" sounds sexier than "Faster Boot".
(yes, that really is why we did it that way.)
Hmm, wonder if it might be Dudley Bose? (c'mon, I can't be the only Hamilton fan around. sucky audio equipment is not the only type of Bose!)
"'Suppose we have the capacity to make it possible for the president of the United States at will to communicate with hundreds of thousands of Iranians at no risk or limited risk? It just changes the world.'"
Right, because those dumb Iranians couldn't possibly know anything until POTUS tells 'em about it. Obama will just do a two minute webcast on how many great jobs are available in the American auto industry, bookended by lolcats, and the government will fall!
Sheesh.
"Other thing I love is how the 3G support is amazing. No more messing around with ppp or weird vodafone apps, just plug the dongle in, pick your network and go. Really smooth."
Brought to you mostly by the fine Dan Williams of Red Hat: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/ , http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/log/ .
(disclaimer: I work at RH too).
"How would the fact that divorcees didn't remarry vs. they do remarry (and re-divorce) nowadays, change the percentage of divorced marriages? Honest question, don't attack me; I ran the logic in my head and it just comes out the same percentage, as long as a given marriage has the same likelyhood to end up in divorce."
Reduce the numbers and it becomes obvious.
Say we have two faithful couples and two pairs of serial divorcees.
In the Olden Days case, we'd have a 50% marriage success rate: there'd be four total marriages, two successful, two ending in divorce.
In the Modern Days case, we'd get more marriages, because the serial divorcees would remarry. Let's say both pairs of serial divorcees switch partners and re-marry, then get divorced again.
Result: two extra marriages, for a total of six, but still only two successful ones. So our success rate goes down to 33%, even though we have the same numbers of "happily ever afters" and "Zsa Zsa Gabors".
Classic journalistic sleight-of-hand: the author interchanges the two entirely different issues of speed and likelihood of injury throughout. I can believe running shoes don't make you less likely to get injured - I've never actually seen any shoe advertising that claim they *do*, though - but they certainly do make you faster.
Yes, lots of top Mexican and Kenyan runners grow up running barefoot. A few have even run and competed well in Grands Prix barefoot. But I'm not aware of any of them who didn't then go on to run *faster* while wearing running shoes.
Yes, Bannister ran the four minute mile wearing thin leather pumps. Now we have running shoes, what times are we running for the mile again?
(Of course there's lots of factors there, but I'd bet a large amount of money the mark wouldn't magically get lowered if the current holder started running barefoot).
So, yes, running shoes probably don't make you any less likely to get injured, but they do make you go faster. Of course, running's a bloody stupid way to exercise anyway. Doesn't do anything for half of your body and beats the crap out of your feet and knees. Go swimming instead. It's a better workout and far less likely to cause injury. I remember the (probably apocryphal) story of a patient asking his doctor if he'd recommend jogging as a form of exercise. "The only time I jog," says the doctor, "is when I'm late for the funeral of a patient who jogged"...
Note to those comparing on the basis of the current U.S. rail system: don't, because it's crap.
For e.g., Josh proposes linking San Francisco, L.A., Seattle and Portland...well hey, they're already connected. Have been for near a century, by the line / train now called the Coast Starlight. It's a beautiful journey from Seattle to L.A. through all the major (and some not so major) towns on the way, the ride is pleasant, the scenery is incredible...and it takes 26 frickin' hours. (I still prefer that to flying, but I'm in a minority there). That's because it's running on tracks that haven't been upgraded, it feels like, since 1926, using trains from 1963 through stations from 1886. It never gets past sixty miles an hour.
A proper Japanese- or European-style high-speed rail network would do *the whole trip* in, oh, seven or eight hours, maybe. Meaning many of the useful internal trips would be 2-3 hours. That'd be huge.
I would really, really love for the U.S. to build this, and for similar upgrades in Canada. I like to travel and I frickin' hate airlines, it would be so nice to have a pleasant, civilized way to cover this continent.
I always liked the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue joke about the first telephone. They were doing famous people's answerphone messages. Here's Alexander Bell's:
"Hello, this is Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first telephone. If you've invented another telephone, please leave a message after the beep."
"It's not so much reading to your own son, but should libraries now have to pay twice because, shockers, they often have reading programs for kids where a librarian will sit down and read a book to a dozen kids. Heck, what about the classroom, where teachers will read to twenty kids. What about book clubs?"
Given that this has been going on for years and the authors' guild hasn't made the smallest squeak of protest, I would say...no. The guy has a perfectly reasonable point. Decent TTS in a widely-used device will basically kill the audiobook market, and authors should be compensated in some way for the revenue lost there. What's wrong with that? All they need to do is increase the ebook licensing fee in respect of the problem, or something, and that's all the AG is asking for. They've never said at any point that they're going to go out and start suing people.
I think Engadget's write-up of this was far more sensible. The way this story was written here is ridiculous.