Fedora sound nightmare (Pulseaudio)

[Suren Karapetyan]

Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 17:00 +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote:
>   
>> Do you have a bug report id?
>> If not, please don't bother us with your sound problems.
>> If yes, there's no need to spam -devel list with your pet bug.
>>     
>
> So you think that while running a stable (not Rawhide) version
> of Fedora, it is normal for me to file a sound-related bug report
> every few days when it stops working, for the past 4 years or so?
>
> And the bug should say what? Sound doesn't work? I tried: kernel
> guys says it's ALSA, ALSA says it's SELinux, others say it's PA.
> It is hopeless -- a single such report takes many hours to follow
> up, and if I'm lucky, I'm told to download some sources and compile
> them myself to test them out (which I'll _not_ do on my RPM-managed
> production system).
>
> I don't have problems with filing bug reports, but please realize
> it's not sustainable to ask a user to _continuously_ file the same
> bug report for a critical system component such as sound. This is
> not a pet bug (as you so graciously remarked), but a critical 
> component on which many business processes revolve 
> (think Skype+conference).
>
> We can't keep breaking working systems in a stable release with such
> ease as it seems to happen now. This is F8, not Rawhide. It's the
> sort of problem that has to be addressed here, not in a bug report.
>
>   
Well it was sometime during FC6 I decided to try PulseAudio :)
and I wanted to try it not because it let me change volume of every 
application separately
but because it was possible to make all the users on the system use the 
same daemon.
That way the system woldn't refuse to open the sound device for user A
when user B was playing something (or just had artsd started).
There were no problems with multiple applications using the same device 
(thanks to ALSA dmix).
It didn't work as good as I thought it could and the latency was quite 
annoying.
It behaved really funny when you just started an audio player and 
started seeking in the track.
So I quit it. When I read PulseAudio was to be integrated in Fedora
I thought it was being done for the same reason I tried to do it.
But obviously it wasn't. It wasn't started as a system-wide daemon.
So it didn't do what I wanted to and the latency remained huge.
But it wasn't a big problem until I started developing a VoIP solution 
for the company I work for.
I installed Twinkle (Sip SoftPhone) to test it. I installed it both at 
home and at work.
Alsa emulation didn't work for it at all nor did oss :). It did work at 
home using :0 device when PA wasn't playing anything
but refused to do the same thing at work. Skype and a few other 
softphones i tried didn't work too.
Removing PA was the only step needed to solve it at home. At work it was 
a bit harder.
I had to remove PA and make Twinkle use ALSA for output and OSS for 
input :D .
I really like the idea of a single sound server (I always admired X11)
but IMHO PA is not ready yet to be enable by default.
BTW SELinux is disabled on both systems and I do "yum update" DAILY.

Suren