Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

> UCM (Use Case Manager - for presets separation, like notifications, voice, media, etc..)

Ok, some domain expert on HN:

What is the UCM, when was it added to ALSA, what is its purpose, who is the target audience (e.g., is this something that helps driver author?), and how does it relate to Pulse?

I'm especially concerned with the last question, because at a glance it seems like Pulse and the UCM overlap partly in purpose.

View on HN

It's like a routing system for audio based on use case. You could say for example: "Play notifications on this device", "Play media on that other device at this volume", "Mute anything that's VOIP", etc.. Kind of like what you have on mobile operating systems. As far as I could see, this isn't used by anything major. PipeWire is planning on making use of this in the future.

Pulses reason for existing was that ALSA couldn’t handle multiple sources running at the same time _yet_.

It was always on the table though and now it has been implemented. That’s why there’s significant overlap, those projects are not complementary, they are somewhat competitive.

Whenever given the opportunity, I immediately yank PulseAudio and replace it with a properly configured JACK+Alsa rig. This happens mostly on the workstations of musician friends who think they are being clever by using an enterprise Linux distro like RedHat, instead of an audio-specific distro like kxStudio or UbuntuStudio - the former is guaranteed to be a headache, the latter is smoother than anything else out there ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com