Re: Disabling pulseaudio

[Mike Holstein]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> On Tue, 2013-07-09 at 06:37 -0700, Len Ovens wrote:
> > Quite honestly, Linux audio is still pretty messy.
>
> Unfortunately this is true :(. But a lot of this mess is caused by our
> community. 1. Why not working on one sound server that is useful for all
> tasks instead of working on a new sound server again and again? 2. When
> reporting bugs people shouldn't be called names, e.g. when I reported
> the issues I get with my RME HDSPe AIO. The AIO doesn't work correctly
> here, when I warned somebody _not_ to buy this card the coder of the
> driver not only called me names, but also discredited me. Another
> ignorant coder is responsible for pulseaudio, I never had issues with
> this man, since I don't use it and don't report pulseaudio bugs.
>

this is exactly what im talking about, Ralph.. you had an issue with pulse
whenever that was, 4 or 6 years ago, and you dont use it. so, dont comment
on its quality, or call its developers "ignorant" here on this list,
please. what if we had a pulse audio developer on this list? you realize
that is combative? correct? that is likely why you got attacked/discredited
before... more of a "retaliation" than an attack.. anyway, lets stick to
the facts

you, Ralph, are a valuable asset to this community. you are an excellent
and thorough troubleshooter with impeccable attention to detail. you are
also not a pulse audio user. if you have opinions about pulse, or the pulse
community, or the pulse developers, or the volunteers who develop or
support, create pulseaudio, take those comments somewhere where opinions
like that are welcome. maybe a social media outlet? if you want to discuss
the facts of removing pulse and working without pulse, and using a machine
without pulse, i and other users who want to use a system without pulse
consider that valuable information, and it is welcome and encouraged here.

an easy way (at least for now) to try ubuntu without pulseaudio is to use a
lubuntu live CD. they do not ship pulse by default, and it *is* ubuntu with
the same repos and kernel availability and access to packages. one could
install lubuntu and add just what they want from the repos for an audio
studio and have a system without pulse for audio work.

*sample plausible scenario where one would remove pulseaudio and things
would get "better", thus, making one assume pulseaudio is the issue with
the system:

due to hardware/driver support or system resources or configuration,
removing the overhead of having pulse running allows the system audio more
system resources to work properly. this would be similar to removing any
arguably unnecessary processes from a system, making it seem that the thing
you removed is the cause, but its actually the resources being freed up
that seems to "fix" the issue. thus, leading to...

plausible reasons for removing pulse audio:

- i dont want the overhead of pulseaudio running on my system
- i prefer not using pulseaudio at all since all i use is JACK, and im not
interested in the pulse to jack bridge, or pulse audio for any reason

"pulse audio is crap", coming from a user who does *not* use pulse audio,
or anyone else *is* opinion, and should be regarded as such.. thanks



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Re: Disabling pulseaudio

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2013-07-09 at 06:37 -0700, Len Ovens wrote:
> Quite honestly, Linux audio is still pretty messy.

Unfortunately this is true :(. But a lot of this mess is caused by our
community. 1. Why not working on one sound server that is useful for all
tasks instead of working on a new sound server again and again? 2. When
reporting bugs people shouldn't be called names, e.g. when I reported
the issues I get with my RME HDSPe AIO. The AIO doesn't work correctly
here, when I warned somebody _not_ to buy this card the coder of the
driver not only called me names, but also discredited me. Another
ignorant coder is responsible for pulseaudio, I never had issues with
this man, since I don't use it and don't report pulseaudio bugs.




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Re: Disabling pulseaudio

[Len Ovens]

On Tue, July 9, 2013 12:10 am, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> IMO the claim that pulseaudio is crap isn't an opinion, but an objective
> fact. Even if it shouldn't cause issues after disabling it, the way the
> leveling is one (and often not working) is idiotic. IIRC Fons once said
> something similar to "if an audio engineer would adjust the level in one
> signal chain by several faders at the same time, the engineer would be
> fired for the incompetence".

And one who chooses something that worked like the Intel HDA IF would be
fired too, but that is what Pulse has to work with most of the time and
for whatever reason, Pulse is what most desktop apps work with best. There
is good reason for someone who is just doing audio to have to be able to
deal with desktop apps.

The second point is that while apps that are designed for Pulse can
sometimes work with jack directly... they do not play nice. They auto
connect to channel 1 and 2 outputs no matter if you are using 9 and 10 for
your output (S/PDIF) or worse audacious for example auto connects to all
outputs.

Audacity is still one of the top audio file editors. When setup to use
jack it creates new jack ports every time it is started, with new names.
Then as soon as you hit stop, they all vanish. Reconnecting an app
manually to i/o while it is in pause each time I want to play a track when
I could be working does not sound useful.

Also, when running through jack, pulse only does one level per track and
leaves the alsa levels alone.

In its youth PA had many problems. Seems it just works any more. Seems
pulse supports more HW than alsa does... though not FW, but that is
probably a plus. It's like anything you have to learn your tools. It does
take time to learn to use pulse in a studio situation. There are settings
in pulse that can make it work with jack better too.

There is still no phone application that talks to jack direct. But then I
don't suppose you do radio talk shows either.

Quite honestly, Linux audio is still pretty messy. There is not one
solution that does everything well. Jack, pulse, alsa, etc all have their
problems. The best solution for most people is to use them all for what
each works best at. Having a switch to turn the PA-jack link off at need
does make sense to me.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net


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Re: Disabling pulseaudio

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2013-07-09 at 01:15 -0400, Mike Holstein wrote:


> i can choose to use JACK only, when i have pulse installed.. thats the
> way i use my production machine.. "pulse is crap" is an opinion..
> there is nothing wrong with pulse, and no reason to remove it to use
> JACK without pulse.. nor is there any compelling reason to remove it
> anyway, unless you want to.. in the case that you want to, just remove
> it

We shouldn't discuss this, but simply help the OP. I assume that you're
able to explain what the OP needs to do, to disable pulseaudio while
everything then should use ALSA, since the OP runs into issues after
disabling pulseaudio ;). Why keeping it, when it's not needed ;)?

IMO the claim that pulseaudio is crap isn't an opinion, but an objective
fact. Even if it shouldn't cause issues after disabling it, the way the
leveling is one (and often not working) is idiotic. IIRC Fons once said
something similar to "if an audio engineer would adjust the level in one
signal chain by several faders at the same time, the engineer would be
fired for the incompetence".



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