Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Honestly this area is so frustrating technologically.

MacOS has easily the best Audio subsystem across MacOS & Windows.

In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).

But then Linux suffers from having very little commercial support and worse than that, a lot of problems with hardware video encoding.

Windows doesn't have any problems encoding video, but it has a terrible filesystem (which is forced on you) that causes problems for the insanely large files that you must work with on video production and in addition: the audio subsystem is the worst of all three platforms.

Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.

View on HN

> In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).

screams in terror

The ideas are great, the realization is jackshit. Sooo much finicky crap that partly also depends of whether your sound output is special enough to work well with it. And trying to make it play nice with pulseaudio is another nightmare.

Pulseaudio itself also suffers massively from UI problems, pretty much all non-basic use cases is either mess with configs or "just run a bunch of commands on runtime or every time your USB interface reconnects". Jack at least gets that part right

Trying to get some audio interface to be connected properly was... an experience, it just showed in system as one stereo input (it was 2 mono inputs) and 4.0 output (it had 4 separate outs) so there was a good deal of pulseaudio fuckery to run to just split it properly

> Linux could be a contender, if someone threw $100M USD at the problem, but getting adoption for a linux solution would be hard because the Apple stuff works "fine" and movie productions are more time constrained than cost constrained.

I wonder if someone figuring out how to run the usual tools via Wine/Proton and somehow integrate nicely with pipewire would've been enough...

Pulseaudio is so extremely over complicated that it took years of distro maintainers trying to wrangle it into a working default configuration for many people, and it was adopted because ALSA didn’t (but was going to) support multiple inputs to a single output.

It is a prime example of short-sighted “just rewrite it then!” Style Behaviours in FOSS and continues to be brought up in conversations about subsystem replacements (such as systemd).

Pipewire is a good replacement, but pulseaudio is to JACK what windows movie maker is to Final Cut.

It doesn’t deserve to be brought up when talking about professional solutions.

It really is amalgamation of "whatever works fine as default on Lennart Poettering's private laptop". Hell, I still remember where "sec, I need to restart pulseaudio" was common thing I've read from my colleagues any time they needed to run some voice chat app...

ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default and needed to fuck around with dmix gave way to endless problems with various software, and the fact dmix was still working subtly different than "real" device also reared its ugly head in many "pro audio" apps.

I could never understand why it was adopted. It was written to solve problems that nobody faced. I still remember Fedora Core 2 (??) being useless with audio due to them adopting PulseAudio. I try to minimise my contact with any of Poettering's software as much as possible since then.

I still remember being shocked at the bloat. It sat there eating something like 100x the memory of my entire sound stack before that (granted, easy to hit a large multiple when the baseline is very low), with pretty frequent CPU spikes, all while no sound was playing. WT actual F. And the CPU use was straight-up vulgar when it was actually doing anything.

It was then that I decided whoever was responsible for it had no software-architectural taste whatsoever. I didn't yet know his name. His work since then hasn't changed my mind.

> ALSA before that wasn't great either, the fact you didn't get any software mixing by default

It was being developed.

People jumped on Pulseaudio and made it the default before it was finished because the ALSA contributers wanted to do it in a way that was either going to work for embedded or be optional in a reasonable way, IE; they were trying to do it right, took too long, and it got replaced with something much worse that did the job.

Which, happens unfortunately frequently.

Similar story for how ALSA came to exist, really. Linux folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's replace it" and made ALSA.

The FreeBSD folks looked at OSS and said "this blows, let's fix it". And did. And they're still on that while Linux is headed into its third major audio shake-up in the same time span (OSS -> ALSA -> PulseAudio -> PipeWire).

Saying this as FreeBSD user: FreeBSD didn't switch this many times because no one is working on a new thing. The community is already small, the community of people using it on desktop is even smaller. Developers that can work on any of this - almost doesn't exist at all.

Corporate money and contribution go to: storage, network, scheduler. Anything desktop related doesn't get any love. I bet that PR for EoL drm-kmod from linux still not merged.

I thought to myself, I think I'll stream some Codewars challenges on Twitch. I have a Shure mic, a Sony ZV-E10, and some speakers for listening to music. Surely Linux can handle all this and pipe the audio into OBS...

Yes... it is possible. No, it's not something I ever want to do ever again.

I don't understand why you bring pulsaudio to the table when answering about JACK. This is unrelated.

> In Linux we have JACK, which is as good as MacOS (if not better honestly).

And now we have Pipewire which is not only better, but can also pretend it's Jack for compatibility.

Pipewire still had its issues (mixing setups can easy cause weird sound issues) but it's much better than anything that came before it.

I'd go as far as to say Pipewire made connecting to my Bluetooth headphones more reliable on Linux than on Windows, though neither audio stack is particularly good.

Does MacOS even have OS level independent volume control for each app yet?

This was what everyone said was the reason for wrecking Linux with PulseAudio, all those years ago.

I've still never cared and don't know why I should. What am I missing? I've used systems with that, but never bothered to try using it because... why would I? Every media player has a volume control, YouTube has a volume control, every game has a volume control (usually multiple, for different types of sound), and 99% of the time I just want everything at about the same level anyway. The last thing I want to do is have another place a given program could have its volume set or muted or whatever, so then I have another place to look when it's not doing what I want. One per-program (built in to the programs) and one global is quite enough.

For me it wasn't so much the per-app/stream mixer but per-stream dynamic routing that was the important feature of Pulse (though I've moved on to PW now).

I'm not too sure how this is handled on other platforms, but pre-PA the in-app volume control would often modify the global mixer, rather than implement an in-app mixer/attenuator, which is definitely not what you usually want. In most Linux apps these days, those controls manipulate and are synchronized with the PA mixer, so there's still only one actual mixer, they are the same control. I assume that other OSes also do per-stream mixing in a similar manner, and just choose not to expose the mixer for whatever reason.

As much as people complain about PulseAudio it's always worked well for me, and from what I've seen of Windows and macOS alternatives, it's more featureful and usable out of the box.

You can’t even mute Zoom on Mac OSX. Frequently I want to leave video up but mute anyone that is talking.

Sort of? The kernel supports this and has forever, but the OS doesn’t ship with an app that exposes the capability. It’s super annoying. There are a number of third party apps, some free, some paid.

I use SoundSource for this, but I did pay $39 for it.

https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/

Why should the OS solve app problems?

Yeah.

Why do we need `open()` anyway?

(this is sarcasm, the OS exists only to solve app problems).

Not that I've found!

windows still has the audio mixer to beat

Which is why every professional audio tool uses ASIO and every audiophile player is going to great lengths to avoid the audio mixer and uses things like kernel streaming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com