State of sound in Linux not so sorry after all

Post by **Nach** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 9:36 am

An update to the old classic: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... sorry.html

gllt · Post by **gllt** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:57 pm

*clap*

Well written. I enjoyed glancing at it this morning, when I get some energy I'll take a closer look.

Post by **odditude** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 5:30 pm

well-written and informative. thanks!

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:10 pm

I look at the default stuff distributed by a distro as a matter of convenience... but mainly everyone is looking for all that stuff to be integrated well (it's pretty much an MS philosophy, except MS still can't quite get their browser security on par with the alternatives). If things are "broken" out of the box, that becomes an issue for newbies, but also those that are familiar with the distro. As a user, you want some control, but primarily I want stuff working out of the box.

In any case, stupid added latency is bad, and people should shaddap about PulseAudio.

tukuyomi · Post by **tukuyomi** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:30 pm

Deathlike2 wrote:except MS still can't quite get their browser security on par with the alternatives

C'mon...

Joke

... or not?

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:54 pm

tukuyomi wrote:
Deathlike2 wrote:except MS still can't quite get their browser security on par with the alternatives
C'mon...

Joke ... or not?

Just add a useless checkmark and we're all set!

Seriously, it's not a useful comparison.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:04 pm

Good to know they're working on the state of sound in Linux.

paulguy · Post by **paulguy** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:13 am

Cool article. I agree with a lot of it and I'm willing to try OSS again now that I found out about ALSA using OSS as a back-end. I just hope that it treats my new sound card better than my old one (no mixing for SPDIF).

Post by **odditude** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:37 am

you've been slashdotted.

kick · Post by **kick** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 1:05 pm

Take the current ALSA and fuse it with the 64-bit FP SW mixer from OSS4, integrate JACK2 into the mix (for ridiculously low latencies and advanced connectivity) and you have the perfect Linux audio system

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 9:11 pm

how does Pulseaudio reduce latency?

Post by **grinvader** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 10:47 pm

funkyass wrote:how does Pulseaudio reduce latency?

Where did you see someone saying that ?

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 11:02 pm

this fellow said that, so did this other fellow.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 11:41 pm

funkyass wrote:this fellow said that, so did this other fellow.

Shoot those fellows then?

Seriously, I don't want to hear Pulseaudio is for everything talk. There's not enough specific cases that are mentioned (UT shouldn't be a strain on anything)... especially when you NEED the low latency. Pretty most stuff that's non-ALSA or non-OSS is a wrapper... which is just asking for extra overhead... and the impact really does depend on what you're doing.

I'm starting to think related Linux discussions are primarily about complaining about how major components aren't working and less action about actually fixing it...

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 12:45 am

funkyass wrote:this fellow said that, so did this other fellow.

I like how one of them links an article to explain how PulseAudio reduces latency, when the author of the article directly states in the comments that this INCREASES latency.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 1:48 am

Gil_Hamilton wrote:
funkyass wrote:this fellow said that, so did this other fellow.
I like how one of them links an article to explain how PulseAudio reduces latency, when the author of the article directly states in the comments that this INCREASES latency.

Someone failed to read... or even just searched for latency in that article. The point was to make it adaptive (I think) for most things ("glitch free"), except under low latency situations, where it still fails.

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:51 am

fanboyism is a curse.

gllt · Post by **gllt** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:54 am

funkyass wrote:fanboyism is a curse.

properly delivered understandable and simple informative truth is the cure.

Post by **Nach** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:10 am

adventure_of_link wrote:Good to know they're working on the state of sound in Linux.

Well yes and no, too many Linux developers are just accepting the status quo, which is a bad thing.

kick wrote:Take the current ALSA and fuse it with the 64-bit FP SW mixer from OSS4, integrate JACK2 into the mix (for ridiculously low latencies and advanced connectivity) and you have the perfect Linux audio system

Something along those lines would probably be a good idea.

funkyass wrote:how does Pulseaudio reduce latency?

It doesn't, it'd be retarded to think that it does.
I wouldn't be surprised if people start saying that PulseAudio's 5-10% CPU usage gives your CPU more MHz, so using it makes your computer faster.

funkyass wrote:this fellow said that, so did this other fellow.

Those are the same fellows, no?

Anyways, this is the "PulseAudio propaganda machine" referred to in the article. These guys are going around everywhere saying how PA which is 3 extra layers over everything else makes stuff faster and better. And yeah right, the guy says PA gives him 0 latency, as if such a thing exists. Maybe PA comes with a time machine too.

gllt · Post by **gllt** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 4:54 am

Nach wrote:
funkyass wrote:how does Pulseaudio reduce latency?
It doesn't, it'd be retarded to think that it does.
I wouldn't be surprised if people start saying that PulseAudio's 5-10% CPU usage gives your CPU more MHz, so using it makes your computer faster.

Taking notes from your sister, Nach?`

Post by **Nach** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 6:42 am

gllt wrote:
Nach wrote:
funkyass wrote:how does Pulseaudio reduce latency?
It doesn't, it'd be retarded to think that it does.
I wouldn't be surprised if people start saying that PulseAudio's 5-10% CPU usage gives your CPU more MHz, so using it makes your computer faster.
Taking notes from your sister, Nach?`

No, taking notes from propaganda being spewed out there.

BTW, that's a paraquote of what the original author responded in the comments.

link

Yeah, and the PulseAudio dev and his cronies going around saying how it reduces latency is funny too. Next they're going to say that PulseAudio's 5-10% CPU usage actually gives your CPU more MHz, so running PulseAudio actually reduces load and makes the rest of your machines faster.

adventure_of_link · Post by **adventure_of_link** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 5:25 pm

Nach wrote:
adventure_of_link wrote:Good to know they're working on the state of sound in Linux.
Well yes and no, too many Linux developers are just accepting the status quo, which is a bad thing.

Ugh *facepalm*

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:38 pm

Another major problem that propagates PulseAudio are the six or seven people in the world with twelve computers in their home that like to stream audio from their server in the bedroom to the media center in the living room.

Apparently having the media player just access the music files directly from a shared folder is too difficult, and much too bandwidth effective.

Since apparently that solution works well for them, it should definitely be the norm! Never mind the fact that most people, even if they have more than one computer, almost certainly don't network them together.

You know, a KaZaA style P2P network built into ZSNES to automatically search and share save states with others around the world would certainly be cool from a technological perspective, but it's still a stupid fucking idea at the end of the day when we already have vastly superior methods at our disposal.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Mon Jun 22, 2009 12:16 am

byuu wrote:Another major problem that propagates PulseAudio are the six or seven people in the world with twelve computers in their home that like to stream audio from their server in the bedroom to the media center in the living room.

Sounds nifty, but practically useless.

You know, a KaZaA style P2P network built into ZSNES to automatically search and share save states with others around the world would certainly be cool from a technological perspective, but it's still a stupid fucking idea at the end of the day when we already have vastly superior methods at our disposal.

Other than saying a frontend would be better for that, I think cheats would be better than save states. That way, we can make cheat searching easy as Pokemon!

jdratlif · Post by **jdratlif** » Thu Jul 02, 2009 9:22 pm

Is anyone using OSS4 with KDE4. When I tried to change, it said I no longer had a sound card and it stopped working.

I don't know how to change the Phonon backend, which I think is using xine, but I thought that wasn't a problem any longer.

I would like to try OSS4, and I got it working (at least the osstest worked), but it's not working in KDE. I'm not sure, but I think it made mplayer crash too, but that might've been the newer svn revision. I didn't test them independently before I reverted to ALSA.

I'm running gentoo, btw.