PulseAudio 8.0 released | Hacker News Reader

PulseAudio 8.0 released

lists.freedesktop.org

87 pointscaptn3m043 comments

I saw this project the other day for alsa-refugees who have to run apps only supporting pulseaudio (some of my games, skype): apulse. It emulates pulseaudio for the given app.

[0]: https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse

For what benefit? PulseAudio is MUCH better then alsa ever was.

I know the launch of PulseAudio was horrible with Ubuntu and Fedora implementation was just horrible but that was 10 years ago. Now PusleAudio has made Linux Audio much better then it ever was before.

PulseAudio still relies on ALSA or OSS at the Kernel level. Typically most setups are PulseAudio + ALSA.

PulseAudio uses ALSA under the hood. You're dealing with all the problems of ALSA, and have a brittle, crashing, overly complex userspace daemon sitting on top of it.

If you don't need any of PA's features, why bother with it?

Linux audio is leaps and bounds better then it ever was. ALSO ALSA is not a dependency for PulseAudio it uses ALSO uses OSS which after version OSS 4 it has become my sound interface.

This is pretty exciting. There have been loads of stability issues in the past, and it's always nice to see those issues addressed. I like the systemd integration too, that's a nice touch.

Is it usable without systemd? It seems like Linux is getting harder and harder to use without it, to the point where "A Linux system" is systemd.

> It seems like Linux is getting harder and harder to use without [systemd]...

This Gentoo Linux user is getting along juuuuuust fine without systemd. :)

Edit: To bring it on-topic: It's a damn shame that PA -apparently- doesn't let you set playback/record device preference lists that let you specify which of the potentially many sound devices in your system should be used when some or many of them are unavailable. It seems that KDE4 and -IIRC- 5 use Phonon to add this on top of PulseAudio. (Or, actually, they add this on top of whatever sound playback system you're using... whether it is JACK, ALSA, PA, or something else. I've never written software that interacts with Phonon, but -from an end-user perspective- it's pretty great.)

Good to see another Gentoo user. I was avoiding PulseAudio on my desktop, but it's feels necessary on a laptop, especially if you use Bluetooth.

I did have a lot of problems with distorted audio on Linux games, but "killall -9 pulseaudio" before starting a game (forcing it to respawn) usually fixes it.

Fortunately, Gentoo works fine with systemd, too. It's a nice feature of Gentoo that one can choose - ChromeOS uses Upstart and CoreOS systemd (both of them notable Gentoo derivates).

Slackware -current now includes pulse audio because of a desire to upgrade Bluetooth packages. See the Jan 13th entry in the ChangeLog.txt

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

Please file a bug report.

I've been having the same problem with the same solution, but it didn't seem worth dealing with the hassle of reporting a bug for something I had no way of reliably reproducing knowing it'd most likely just get closed or ignored because of that.

> Good to see another Gentoo user.

Hai! :D

> I was avoiding PulseAudio on my desktop, but it's feels necessary on a laptop, especially if you use Bluetooth.

You know, I was gonna say "But I had A2DP working JUST FINE with bluez-alsa, and JACK knows about anything that ALSA knows about!"... and then I started digging around and learned that bluez-alsa hasn't worked since BlueZ 4.x. :/ [0]

Guess I have another project in my queue. :P Hope I can get it in-tree without too much hassle.

[0] I guess that tells me how long it has been since I've paired a Bluetooth headset with my laptop! ;)

> Hope I can get it in-tree without too much hassle.

Good luck, i can't say i have my hopes up.

Oh, by in-tree, I mean "In the Gentoo Portage package tree.". Getting the work merged into Bluez proper would be nice, but I really don't care about that. :)

What is so bad about systemd?

If you're genuinely interested in some discussion pertaining to the answer to that question, use your favorite search engine to search HN for likely phrases and skim until you find some discussion with a significant volume of commentary.

Because of its political nature, this is a topic that's best not discussed unless you have some very specific questions or observations, and you are already very well informed about the merits and faults of both the systemd project and most of the other pieces of software that provide similar functionality. :)

> the systemd project and most of the other pieces of software that provide similar functionality

Agreed. Emphasis on pieces of software, plural.

It has a common point with systemd : the lead is Lennart Poettering.

Sound on linux is a mess. And pulse audio is vastly blamed for it. Complex circonvoluted architecture that overpromised and under delivered..

The guy loves to brag about how he is the messiah of a problem and will fixt it, make galaxy like software that are unstable and leave a mess after his doing saying my job is done, let's work on another project where my genius is needed.

But, after utterly messing up once, notably at the (lack of) design level, he has been entrusted to no overpromise again and make the ultimate revolution for the init process. A lot of coders did not believe in his repentance for the mess in pulse audio : he may be as arrogant as linus torvalds he is as smart and a good coder as rasmus lerdorf.

The PID1 on linux is now known as a solar system of processes with nice chaotic trajectories and astronomers are seriously planning to use systemd alone as a nth body interaction simulator.. unexpected .

I switched from desktop Linux to Windows entirely because of Lennart Poettering. Audio was a complete disaster, as you mentioned. (This was only a few months ago.)

What was so wrong with Linux audio, if you don't mind?

I experience about zero problems. Maybe it's because I don't run pulseaudio.

PulseAudio seems to get by far the most development and support. I tried ALSA and couldn't get any sound at all, and it didn't seem to be very well integrated into my shell. I did get ALSA to work on my laptop, but there were still lots of tradeoffs.

Shell, as in Gnome-Shell? No surprises there if so.

That said, at its core Pulseaudio depends on ALSA for the hardware handling.

Frankly the only useful thing Pulseaudio does it handle inputs and outputs when dealing with multiple sound devices. But then so does JACK.

Everything else, from volume control (hello hearing damage with default settings) to bit rate mangling, is massively superfluous.

There's basically three non-reasons to hate systemd which crop up the most: 1. Its lead author is a bit of an asshole, plus lingering resentment from Pulseaudio. 2. Systemd is not sysvinit, so some of the system administration people learned doesn't translate. 3. Systemd contains functionality that people don't think it should have (usually presented without any argumentation as to why it shouldn't incorporate those features, so it tends to come across as akin to saying that Firefox is bad because web browsers shouldn't have video players built in).

The main reason that does come up that's not really a non-reason (but, I should note, is hard for me to validate as a dispassionate neutral observer) is a fear that systemd is being rammed down users' throats against their wills, partly by distros deciding "there's no alternative" and partly by systemd incorporating ever more tools.

It also is people holding onto the 1970s Unix system architecture and philosophy. Linux is Unix like and systemd is just a better modern system, but others philosophy on systems just won't allow them to support it.

I would not mind systemd, except that logind depends on systemd-init, and DEs are increasingly dependent on logind for various reasons.

For example, more recent versions of upower are just a wrapper around logind. Thus to have a laptop sleep when you close the lib, you need to replace your init process.

Do that in any way sound sane?

While I've definitely seen some of those thrown around, this is the best description of the situation I've personally read: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

Considering that the release notes mention " * OS X and NetBSD support improvements", fears of it only running on Linux systems, let alone only Linux systems with systemd, seem rather unwarranted.

Please, can we not have yet another rehash of that discussion? It would appear because it runs on OSX and *BSD that it shouldn't require Systemd on Linux though lets check, shall we? So a quick download and

   ./configure --help

show

   SYSTEMD_LIBS
              linker flags for SYSTEMD, overriding pkg-config

so it's whatever pkg-config is set to.

> Please, can we not have yet another rehash of that discussion?

I'm not sure what discussion you think we're having, but the conversation that was present ~four hours prior to your comment appears to be largely on-topic, informative, and civil. :)

Call him a prophet because we are having the systemd conversation all over again :(

Yeah. Thanks so much for not leaving well enough alone and contributing to that conversation. :(

Sorry I always get that feeling of defending progress. Its like that bug in "Bugs Life" I just fly right into the light.

https://youtu.be/vod9DL4IhBM

Calculate linux use pulseaudio with OpenRC. I usually rip it out and replace with JACK (which is rock stable and far more robust than PA), but it definitely doesn't need systemd yet.

The reason why is systemd is MUCH easier to use and the majority of developers have jumped on board since it replaced a hack of a system. Just like PulseAudio has made audio life much better systemd has also done the same thing.

Yeah, because if there's one thing we need, it's MORE systemd integration.

At this point, they should just rename it svchost.exe.

Does it still default to "flat volume" active?

Yes, according to the config file `src/daemon/daemon.conf.in` in the tarball.

I'll keep using straight ALSA then, as at least there it will not blow my ear drums if i forget to tweak the settings before first use.

I don't think they'll change it anytime soon. I don't like it at all, and I agree that it is almost dangerous, even though I sort of understand the rationale seeing how non-technical users handle volumes.

It's also kinda of hard to expose in a GUI: a checkbox with "Flat Volumes" is not really self-explanatory. For now I've just added .config/pulse/daemon.conf the config files I drag from one installation to the next.

Non-technical people do a whole lot of strange things. But then i likely do so to in the eyes of someone formally trained in computer operations. Frankly i have learned to grin and bear with them, thanks to being tech support for my parents for over a decade.

Can't wait to try this out

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