I’ve taken then plunge: I just installed PulseAudio (PA) and related tools (on Gentoo). A lot of users are vehemently anti, stating numerous complications and bugs, but its potential advantages for networked audio are attractive.
Evidently KMix is supposed to support PA, but it still only shows the alsa devices. I suspect this is related to when PA is loaded, and currently I do not have any user-space loader. What’s the optimal way for this to happen in KDE? An autostart entry? Symlinking some mysterious file to kde’s env directory? All the forum posts are for older KDE versions. Phonon works so far though. All the PA apps are GTK/GConf based, and aren’t very KDE friendly, and generally it seems like KDE has neglected PA support, or PA has neglected KDE support. They simply aren’t very pretty together. What are the plans for integrating KDE and PA a little bit more closely?
I’m using a Macbook as a print server, printing to it from my Linux box, and everything is simple because they both use CUPS. However, I’m having a bit of trouble streaming audio to it. I can’t seem to build PA on OSX, and I don’t even think OSX is officially supported by PA. I tried installing ESD using MacPorts and using PA’s bridge for that, but it played a half a second of sound before skipping. ESD doesn’t do good latency calculations. PA supports streaming to Airport Express, so I thought I’d try out Airfoil Speakers, but unfortunately, Airfoil uses a different protocol. So I’m not sure what to do now… How do I send PA to my Macbook?
PA also doesn’t work well with Skype, and I anticipate some other problems as well. What a hassle. Why the bad integration with KDE? Why the numerous bugs? Any PA tips from veteran readers?
The Skype issue has just been fixed:
http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2009/08/skype_for_linux_21_beta.html
@Diego
Minutes after posting – awesome thanks.
and you ask why a lot of KDE users (and developers) are against pulseaudio…
@leo
It has the potential to be great though… if only folks would put a little more love into integrating it. The problem is that KDE devs are against PulseAudio. If they supported it, it would become nicely integrated and the rest of the software world would have more motivation to integrate it. The question you have to ask is how good it potentially could be.
Well whatfor do I need PulseAudio (user, programmer, …) ?
Audio hardware is greatly supported by ALSA (including basic sound mixing) and there are several good audio/video codec frameworks. If you want some platform independence within your application (e.g. on plattforms that don’t have ALSA and/or another codec framework) you can either use something like Phonon or hope that Gstreamer exists for every plattform you want.
If you want to do advanced sound mixing and editing etc. you will quickly come to Jack. You certainly don’t want to use PulseAudio for that.
If you want to have network transparent sound you should use an appropriate tool for audio (codec!) streaming (maybe IceCast or VLC) and shouldn’t transmit raw PCM data streams (PCM streams over networks are like VNC compared to NX). Ok if you want a framework for controlling and feeding remote audio devices as well there is NMM (see http://www.networkmultimedia.org ) which existed years before PulseAudio.
Ok the PulseAudio folks just wanted to do their own thing and wanted to reinvent the wheel again. Ok thats fine, Free Software lives from alternatives and maybe they have some better ideas (there is a reason that there are so many text editors
but a sound server who redirects access to my ALSA audio devices and that harms perfectly working competitive audio frameworks running in parallel on that system is an unfriendly uncooperative piece of software that should have never made into serious Linux distributions.
If you want real good platform independence you might you OSS4 for that.its open source, works on various platforms. and provides good mixing. And Phonon on top.
I have PA 0.9.15 installed in KDE 4.3 with 0 problems.
For KDE apps I only configured Phonon to use PA.
For GNOME apps, with configuring gstreamer and/or ESD it works.
For the rest of the apps this http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup should work
Everything works, and it is ease to configure the 5.1 surround speakers.
What KDE needs is GUIs for PA, like the GTK+ ones, could be plasma widgets or something in KMix. Until then I have to use the GTK+ apps like pavucontrol or pavumeter.
PA has some great features, like per-application volume control and better sound quality than the Alsa mixer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio#Features
For the one interested, there is a brainstorm idea to integrate PA with KDE, which would benefit all distros and users. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/20083/
There was a Summer of Code project for a KDE PulseAudio mixer with Pardus (a KDE focused Linux distro) as mentor: http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2009/pardus/t124023187475
http://developer.pardus.org.tr/people/tekman/blog/?p=115
Except the one Pardus student who developed finger print login support for KDM, no one of the other blogged or were not aggregated at Planet KDE. So I have absolutely no idea what happened to the PA mixer.
Ah, and the idea that PA harms and breaks the working sound… it is fault of the distribution or the user who installed and didn’t configured it.
You could try Fedora or Mandriva (I think openSUSE also), PA works very nice with those distros, and now seems that Ubuntu has a working PA configuration.
The in GNOME based distros the have now very nice sound tools, at the level of Mac OS X. We need that in KDE!
Erm. Since when do I need to configure sound??? It worked out of the box for years on several distros. When I bought my Samsung NC10 I had to install the (at that time) new OpenSuse 11.1 because it was the only one with working ACPI on it (now it works with other distros, too).
Anyways I simply didn’t feel like bothering with PulseAudio’s nasty extra volume settings and horrible playback delays. I just wiped of any piece of PulseAudio and afterwards applications using libxine/ALSA just worked like a charm as on my other computers (ok I installed Packman’s libxine in order to have the proprietary codecs…).
As you are refering “nice sound”.
“Nice sound” would be:
1) NO per application volume control per default. All apps that do audio playback should control ONE global PCM control (the one you can find in your mixer applet as well).
2) A nice mixer applet that shows to the people which volume controls are combined with a logical AND.
3) Never create a situation where more than two volume controls are combined until the sound comes out of the speaker.
While PulseAudio seems like a mess in many ways (let’s provide a transparent audio experience by requiring every single application and library to be updated to use PulseAudio! excellent plan), how else do you achieve the things PA does, like a single UI for per-application volume setting across the entire system? So maybe it’s a necessary evil. I dunno.
PA & KDE probably work for simple use cases (making beep noises). But phonon-gstreamer is just too buggy, and xine+pulseaudio isn’t pretty.
So really the most important thing anyone could do is make phonon-gst suck less.
I depend on PA too, as I haven’t found another non-hackish solution for this setup yet:
- I have a 5.1 speaker set
- The 5.1 speaker set is fed through an USB soundcard
- The USB soundcard is attached to my fileserver
- I want to be able to play sound on my 5.1 set from every computer in my network
So I need a solid solution which is able to route the complete sound stream from every client to the fileserver.
PulseAudio was the only one which provided me so far something which worked at least basically (not to mention the stuttering sound via wireless connections, strangely disappearing connections to the soundserver, missing control from KDE applications, PA related bugs when playing music via Amarok, ….).
IMHO PA could really need a little more love in KDE/Phonon.
…but phonon-gstreamer is just too buggy,…
I remember not too far back they were considering dropping gstreamer support from phonon but since I think this has been worked on quite a bit. On my arch install phonon-gstreamer is the default and haven’t come across any problems.
“Since when do I need to configure sound??? It worked out of the box for years on several distros.”
@Arnomane
Yes, you shouldn’t, but I mean if the user compiles PA and installs it, then he has to do the right configuration or use the default which is ok. Or if the user download PA through the package manager of the distro, then the distro has to config PA correctly. It is like enabling DMix by default, it was a distro choose.
“1) NO per application volume control per default. All apps that do audio playback should control ONE global PCM control (the one you can find in your mixer applet as well).”
Why not? It is a great idea, with that you could decrees the volume of music or a video if a call comes.
The other two points is PA willing to resolve.
They (PA team) are not fixing a no existent bug or reinventing the wheel. It is true it has worked ok for many people, but it can work better, and with PA this can be true. We need better sound tools, like a modern OS, take a look at Mac OS X or Win vista, they have better sound tools than Alsa can offer wight now.
I’m using PA too. It makes it easy for me to listen to my music via bluetooth on my hifi… Great thing. And really easy to configure.
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you just got yourself a place in my bookmarks