pulseaudio

[pwatk]

I just want to test the water to see how everyone feels about pulseaudio.

After discovering using pulseaudio via blueman (bluez) could have saved me wasting time off my life configuring ALSA (asound.conf) to use a bluetooth speaker dock I've started to think maybe it's a good idea to replace esound in Salix.

I'd like to point out that I haven't tried installing pulseaudio yet (mostly because I nearly killed the dock and I'm not allowed anywhere near it now ) but I will be when I get my bluetooth headphones in the next week or so.

If everything works as expected and if people want it then I'll build the packages for the next major release of Salix.

-pwatk

[thenktor]

Hmm, all I need is ALSA with dmix. What advantages do I get by using esound, pulseaudio and stuff?

[pwatk]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio

Pulseaudio would make esound redundant but thats not the best bit. In my example it would have created the bluetooth audio device for me via a Blueman plugin without me having to configure asound.conf manually.

Personally, I'd like this to work automatically rather than wasting my time configuring audio devices manually via asound.conf (of which I had limited knowledge before this exercise).

Don't get me wrong, I love learning something new but sometimes I could do without the hassle!

[thenktor]

In my experience everything is rather plug and play with pure ALSA as long as you are using PCI/USB soundcards. Only thing you may have to edit files is if you want to change the default soundcard order, but well made apps allow to specify the outpu device anyway.
AFAIK use of things like esound and arts is outdated since dmix is used by ALSA anyway (I have no experience with esound, but dmix does it's job way better than arts did in KDE3).
I don't know if daemons like pulseaudio and jack would be an improvement for the majority of users, I guess no. For most it would be just another unneeded daemon running on their system. Most users just use a single soundcard anyway.

[pwatk]

My headphones arrived yesterday so I now have a test device.

I wanted to try them out before doing anything else so I paired them with Blueman and modified my ~/.asoundrc file like this:

Code: Select all

pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave.pcm "nokia"
}

pcm.nokia {
	type bluetooth
	device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
	profile "auto"
}

ctl.nokia {
	type bluetooth
}

Everything works but because Exaile was at full volume (and I hadn't noticed) everything was coming out slightly distorted. Although this was quickly fixed I found the xfce mixer doesn't pick up the headset so sound control would have to be done on an application-by-application basis going forward.

Another issue I discovered was mixing sound sources didn't work. I assume dmix can solve this but I haven't looked at that yet.

Following this I thought I'd see how this could work using pulseaudio so I downloaded a Ubuntu livecd and gave it a spin. Unsurprisingly my headset appears in the hardware section of the sound properties once paired, sound source mixing works and the mixer applet works.

With this I rebooted to Salix, installed pulseaudio (and dependencies) using slapt-src and enabled the plug-in in Blueman.

Now I'm stuck.

A device for the headset is created and I can see it in pavucontrol but no matter what I do I can't send sound to it. I obviously removed my ~/.asoundrc file but I replaced it with a /etc/asound.conf file to try to fix the problem:

Code: Select all

pcm.pulse {
	    type pulse
}
ctl.pulse {
	    type pulse
}
pcm.!default {
	    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
	    type pulse
}

Needless to say, this didn't work. If anyone's got any suggestions (with or without using pulseaudio) it would be greatly appreciated.

-pwatk

[thenktor]

Does ALSA perhaps need some compile time options to enable pulseaudio output support?

[pwatk]

I forgot to install the alsa-plugins package . Everything works now using pavucontrol as the mixer.

The icing on the cake would be to have the xfce4-mixer working as well but I'm not sure how to add pulseaudio to the list and there's nothing in the configure script for it.

[Robin]

PulseAudio was a nightmare on every other distro I used that had it. Perhaps it's better on newer hardware than mine, but on my old dog it completely sucked. First thing I do with a new installation of Xubu is to purge that abominable mess from the system.

SalixOS works flawlessly without it! And y'know if it ain't broke.... don't fix it!

[pwatk]

PulseAudio was a nightmare on every other distro I used that had it. Perhaps it's better on newer hardware than mine, but on my old dog it completely sucked. First thing I do with a new installation of Xubu is to purge that abominable mess from the system.

SalixOS works flawlessly without it! And y'know if it ain't broke.... don't fix it!

Unless you have bluetooth headphones that is.

At the moment it's looking unlikely that I'll bother to build the packages anyway because I can't figure out how to make xfce4-mixer work with pulseaudio. Call me a perfectionist but if I can't make this a seamless installation (and uninstallation ) then it's not worth it.

Incidentally, I took a look at Xubuntu last night and noticed that pulse is listed in the mixer .

[Robin]

... I took a look at Xubuntu last night and noticed that pulse is listed in the mixer .

Yup. Until 10.04 Xubu didn't include it, but now it's standard. I don't think PulseAudio is necessary to make Bluetooth functional in the way you describe (because it works in Xubu without PulseAudio). But I'm a newbie so I can't say for sure. Perhaps a "problem" thread about getting Bluetooth to work the way you need it to would be helpful.