Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes
New entries | CodeJack ok, but PulseAudio?
I heard a lot about PulseAudio. I have used Jack. I read Lennart's post about PulseAudio and Jack. Still I don't see why I "need" PulseAudio. I have never used it. And I am not missing a thing. Audio comes out of my Gentoo box just fine using plain ALSA. No KDE phonon. No arts. No esd. Just ALSA. So what's the point of having PulseAudio altogether? Maybe you can enlighten me.
Notes from readers, my comments appended:
Notes from readers, my comments appended:
- per application volume control: but you don't need PulseAudio for that. Applications are doing that fine without it.
- sane volume control (ALSA presents lots of sliders, most of them doing nothing): okay. I like the volume control on a Mac: there is a single control, period. Like on your stereo. Big round knob.
- seamless switching between different audio devices (think speaker -> bluetooth headset): okay. Fine for me, I have internal laptop speakers, and headphones.
- mixing audio in userspace where it belongs: whatever, that is a purely academic problem.
- and most important: fixing long-standing bugs in some ALSA drivers: what? when your car is broken, you buy a horse?
- sound over a network: okay, I can see uses for that in VMs and media servers. Again I have no use for it.
- sane volume control (ALSA presents lots of sliders, most of them doing nothing)
- seamless switching between different audio devices (think speaker -> bluetooth headset)
- mixing audio in userspace where it belongs
and most important: - fixing long-standing bugs in some ALSA drivers...