Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Mark David Dumlao]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:48 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 04/20/2013 05:34 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote
>>
>
> [snip]
>
>>> If you need it, PA can be great. Not everyone needs or wants it, many
>>> people are quite content to just carry on as they always did and aren't
>>> fazed with minor niggles about their audio. You seem to fall in this
>>> category, so do many others.
>>
>>   I think you've hit the nail on the head.  Complex setups require
>> complex software... deal with it.  An analogy is that an 18-wheeler
>> semi-tractor trailer with a 17-speed manual transmission (plus air brakes
>> that require months of training to manage/use) is much more powerful
>> than a Chevy Sonic hatchback when it comes to hauling huge loads.  But
>> for someoneone who merely wants to zip out to the supermarket and buy a
>> week's groceries, the hatchback is much more appropriate.
>>
>>   Similarly, PulseAudio may be better at handling complex situations
>> like you describe.  The yelling and screaming you're hearing are from
>> the 99% of people whose setups are not complex enough to justify
>> PulseAudio.  Making 100% of setups more complex in order to handle the
>> 1% of edge cases is simply wrong.
>>
>
> The sad thing is, I've not infrequently wound up with sound systems that
> were *too* complex for PulseAudio to handle. At least, they were too
> complex for the configuration interfaces available, and documentation
> for how to do things more precisely (without writing code) was not
> forthcoming.
>
> Here's a scenario exactly as I was dealing with it around 2008:
>
> Dodo was a combination HTPC/desktop box.[1] It had five displays and
> three audio interfaces attached to it. Four of the displays sat on my
> desk, one of the displays was a 32" 720p TV that served as the home
> theater screen.[2] The machine was sometimes used in both roles at once.
>
> The three audio interfaces were:
>
> 1) The onboard audio, which I sometimes used while using the box as a
> workstation.
> 2) A USB audio device, which I used if I was chilling on the couch and
> needed localized audio
> 3) A professional audio interface (I forget what, now) that fed my
> receiver as well as a crossover that built an LFE channel.
>
> PA kinda worked in this scenario, up until I physically interacted with
> the USB audio device. If I plugged into that, *everything* would
> suddenly route through the USB audio device, despite my careful routing
> of different applications to different audio sources.
>

Probably no longer needed, but this is done by a default pulseaudio
module, module-switch-on-connect, which is installed  by default on
Ubuntu.

In /etc/pulse/default.pa, there would be a line
load-module module-switch-on-connect

that would do this. If disabled, you keep your routing after connects.
No nice gui for configuring it as far as I can tell, though.

> If I'd learned to use JACK, things probably would have been easier...but
> I was using Ubuntu,[3] everything seemed designed around leveraging PA,
> and I hadn't learned to discard fancy desktop environments yet.
>
> You know the sad thing, though? ALSA would support that configuration
> very well, too. It has enough internal routing and mixing logic that
> it'd work.
>
>
> [1] It was also the home gateway router, too, but that's another
> story...and not much of one.
> [2] Incidentally, this was the same setup where I'd successfully mixed
> ATI and nVidia graphics hardware. I used the nvidia proprietary drivers
> and the open-source support for ATI...which admittedly wasn't much. But
> that's another story.
> [3] I wasn't consistently using Gentoo yet. That rather relates to the
> machine doubling as the network gateway...[4]
> [4] No, I wouldn't do a setup this complicated as one machine as a
> keystone in the network. At least, not again.
>



--
This email is:    [ ] actionable   [ ] fyi        [ ] social
Response needed:  [ ] yes          [ ] up to you  [ ] no
Time-sensitive:   [ ] immediate    [ ] soon       [ ] none