Re: [gentoo-user] Removing pulseaudio

[Alan McKinnon]

On 18/04/2013 21:32, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Gentoo.
>
> I've just removed pulseaudio from my main Gentoo system.  Why?  Several
> reasons:
>
> (i) It's a "sound server", a description I don't understand.  What does
> it _do_?  Why do I want it?  It seems to be an unnecessary layer of fat
> between sound applications and the kernel.

Ah yes, pulseaudio. The software that seems to solve a problem that does
not exist but actually does and which few people understand.

Expressed in conceptual black box terms, pulse audio is an effort to
deal with this scenario:

On a modern personal computing device, you have:

1. many input audio sources
2. many output audio sinks
3. many requirements for what happens in the middle

Audio apps tend to not be aware of the environment they run in, and not
be aware of what you want to happen with the sound. A bluetooth app has
no real way of knowing you want incoming phone calls to be sent to a
headset, to use the laptop's built-in mic and run the whole lot through
an audio filter to account for impaired hearing (i.e. boost the middle
frequencies). All whilst Amarok continues to play mp3s on speakers in
the next room.

True, that sounds contrived, but audio just works like that - consider
all the combinations you have on the sound system in your living room.

Trying to get apps to deal with this is an impossible task, so enter
pulseaudio. It knows about sources and sinks and has a config file so
that it can sit in the middle as a fat layer and apply this intelligence.

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.

Feel free to remove PA if you don't need it. I really don't see any
scope for Lennart to make all of alsa redundant anytime soon (unlike
udev...)


>
> (ii) I was having problems with the last 1-2 seconds being cut off audio
> streams from news sites.
>
> (iii) The provenance of the code; it's author is also udev's maintainer,
> the udev that has given most of us so much fun over the months.  When
> might awkwardnesses start appearing in pulseaudio?
>
> By the way, I run sound stuff mainly in Gnome 2, using aqualung to play
> CDs and listening to audio files streamed or downloaded from the net.
>
> So, I grasped the nettle, put in a negative pulseaudio use flag, unmerged
> pa and alsa-plugins, then rebuilt the 14 packages which needed it.
>
> Surprisingly, everything still works.  I now get those last seconds from
> my news streams.  :-)
>
> So, yes, I can recomment the removal of pulseaudio, unless anybody's got
> some particular need for it.
>


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com