Re: [gentoo-user] Re: gnome-control-center any way to configure without pulseaudio?

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 7:08 PM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> wrote:
>  An answer from a different Walter <G>...
>
>> I also don't use pulse - plain ALSA is good enough for me - but looking
>> over the design goals for pulseaudio I see a decent attempt to deal
>> with audio properly for the future. These days we have computers and
>> devices that can interact with many other things in weird and
>> wonderful ways and software needs to deal with that.
>
> [...deletia...]
>
>> I just curious why you think that it's not useful to the ordinary
>> user in a generic wide way.
>
>  I'll throw the question back to you.  What specific benefits do you
> see?  Not just generalities, but real life benfits, please.

Bluetooth headset,configured with two or three clicks of a mouse. And
then reroute the sound of Skype (or whatever app) to the headset while
nice background music still plays on the speakers.

> Sound
> daemons in general seem to be solutions in search of a problem.  And if
> they couldn't find any problems to solve, they'd make up some new ones
> of their own.  I remember the first I heard of pulseaudio was all the
> weeping and moaning of people on this forum and the GTALUG (Toronto area
> linux mailing list) trying to get sound working again after installing
> pulseaudio.

Have you tried PulseAudio lately? I haven't heard complains in a long time.

>  Remember arts and esd?  They went the way of HAL.

Yeah, because they sucked. Pulse doesn't (haven't in a long time;
almost all the complains were made years ago). The architecture of esd
and aRts was wrong from the beginning; not necessarily the fault of
the devs, they were the first tries at a sound daemon. Pulse (which
was PolypAudio before) learn from those mistakes and then it had its
own set of evolving pains (that's when a lot of people, specially
using distributions packaging before time, complained about it).

HAL was different; it was to please the "lets be portable" crowd.
IMHO, it was doomed from the beginning.

>  Nuff said.  The
> thing to remember is that humans cannot multitask audio very well.  Try
> listening to 2 radio stations at once, and see what I mean.

Well, I talk with Skype and listen to background music all the time
(see above). And kids these days seem to be able to handle more data
streams at the same time; just some days ago I saw a 15yo cousin of
mine chatting on Skype while she heard background music *and* watched
and listened to a music video on YouTube.

Maybe this shiny new stuff is not for the old guys like us. But I
certainly like it; I love my blueetooth headset, and it "just works"
with PulseAudio and Bluez (and GNOME on top of them).

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México