Re: [gentoo-user] USB sound

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 10:24 AM Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××.uk>
wrote:
[...]

> Have I to go the PulseAudio route after all?
>

Hi Peter; I had refrained to comment in this thread since I had nothing to
contribute regarding your original question. However, since you now ask if
you should go to the PA route, I'm going to put my two cents on the issue.

I moved to PulseAudio with Gnome 2.26 more than a decade ago, in 2009. I've
some small issues with it through the years, but the worst case scenario
always has been resolved with a quick "pulseaudio -k", and even that has
happened four or five times in all these years. Also, I do not work with
audio professionally, but I do use several audio sources and sinks
(including Bluetooth headphones and USB microphones) and since the
quarantine I had to record video for online courses, using the USB
microphone integrated to my webcam. PulseAudio usually just works™,
specially if you use its own tools, like pavucontrol.

(It also works incredible well with flatpak and Valve Proton in Steam,
which allows me the play Windows games in Linux almost flawlessly.)

For me, the most annoying thing I had to do with PulseAudio has been that
sometimes I need to plug and unplug a headphone jack connector so the sound
automatically goes through it. That's it.

However this easy of use (specially with plug-and-play) comes with a cost:
you are surrendering control of the audio stack to PulseAudio *completely*.
You can configure it inside the confines that PulseAudio itself defines;
but if you enable PulseAudio and you try to fight it, you ARE going to
lose. This is a feature; not a bug.

I use my Gentoo machines to work (and sometimes to play a video game); not
to learn the intricacies of ALSA. I'm fine with PulseAudio making the shots
regarding anything sound related; it's the same reason I use Gnome and
systemd. But I know a lot of people (specially Gentoo users) have *very*
strong feelings about the control they believe they have over the software
they use and that they usually didn't wrote nor contributed to it. As a
professional programmer and a college programming professor, I like to
think I know better.

If you want to keep 100% control on the audio in your system (or to believe
you have said control), in my experience what will happen is exactly your
current scenario: the moment your hardware is a little more dynamic than an
integrated or PCIe sound card, everything goes off the rails. Then is time
for the litany of searching the web and asking for help until it kinda
works, sometimes, except on Wednesdays and when it's raining... and then
you change a little your system and you need to start all over again.

Or you can try to trust a piece of software specifically written to handle
this kind of scenarios. But then you have to truly trust it; and with the
knowledge that it *WILL* sometimes fail, because no software is perfect.

I choose the second.

Now some concrete advise, if you choose to go the PulseAudio route:

1. Remove your user from the audio group.
2. Delete any /etc/asound* files
3. Delete any ${HOME}/.asoundrc file
4. Don't modify any file on /etc/pulse

It should just work™. Otherwise there is a piece of software or user/system
configuration trying to fight PulseAudio. That will not turn out OK.

Regards.
-- 
Dr. Canek Peláez Valdés
Profesor de Carrera Asociado C
Departamento de Matemáticas
Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México