Linux sound is a steaming pile | Hacker News Reader

Linux sound is a steaming pile

renesd.blogspot.com

8 pointsillumen15 comments

Linux sound is broken IMO till it travels seamlessly over remote connections, just like a mouse and a screen do.

X handles Mouse and Keyboard and Screen I/O, and there is no reason sound should not be considered a basic I/O that should go too.

Just add another

  Section "InputDevice"

or xorg.conf, and OutputDevice as well. Each Xserver will list the specs it can handle (frequency/bitrate/channels), and clients will either adjust themself to the capabilities of the server, or pick some master format and convert on the fly as needed.

This fellow created XAudio as an X11 extension:

http://www.chaoticmind.net/~hcb/murx/xaudio/

But sound shouldn't go over the same connection as your mouse and keyboard all the time. I currently use Pulseaudio to stream my sounds from both my laptop and desktop to an always-on server hooked up to a stereo. Xorg would be out of place for that kind of sound transport.

There is already a protocol for this, though not in X. (Edit - well yeah, that's the point you were making, sorry. But this may be of interest anyway) It's quite robust and used in a number of commercial applications, like Reaktor. Unfortunately it seems to have exactly zero traction with hardware manufacturers.

http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc

JACK is pretty good too...but I see your point. Audio development on Linux fragmented several years ago - LADSPA vs ALSA was the start of that, IIRC - and although it's fairly robust today, almost everything feels years behind the Windows/Mac platforms. Video is even worse. For anyone but experimental artists or those with an in-house development team, it doesn't offer much of a platform for commercial work and is likely to scare potential clients away.

Supposedly if you enable the PulseAudio module-x11-publish option, audio will be forwarded correctly over the network.

is it really about network sound ?

95% of the desktop users needs sound to work [a] when two streams (e.g. a video game and music) are played [b] low latency sound in video games (a.k.a lipsync)

Another 4% wants good audio tools to work on in Linux - which there arent many of. I dunno if this is a catch-22 because of the innumerable sound SDKs.

In a previous comment I had posted described Jonathan Blow's (creator of Braid) problems with low latency sound and APIs on Linux. And this is a guy who has been using linux for over a decade now.

The thread over at his blog has been going for over a year now (http://braid-game.com/news/?p=364) and makes for interesting reading.

Sound has been my one big disappointment since moving to Linux. I cannot believe how broken it is - a hodge-podge of half-built mini tools that don't play nice together and don't add up to anything close to a decent audio environment.

I installed Rosegarden on Ubuntu 9.04 with high hopes, but after hours of monkeying around with it, it flat-out will not play music. Likewise, I installed timidity and what I had read was a kick-ass soundfont, only to discover that about a third of the instruments are simply missing.

Arrgh!

Gnome's new sound manager is wonderful, and Timidity works great in 9.10 :)

Great news! Just a month to go...

I don't understand the "(not worth reading)" at the end of your headline.

Sorry, updated headline.

Isn't (worth reading) redundant given that you posted it?

I thought he meant worth reading despite the flame bait title.

And why use the words "steaming pile" (i.e. a pile of shit) when that's not what the article says. Very confusing.

In retrospect, it looks like this guy is just blogspamming. Nothing to see here.

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