PulseAudio and sound apps (was: Re: Orphaning a few packages)

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Sat Apr 18 00:22:49 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 18:26 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > JACK should not be used by anything by default, with the exception of
> > audio production software.
> 
> The problem there is: where does "desktop software" stop and "audio
> production software" start? For example, Audacity (which thankfully
> supports PulseAudio these days, and BTW it also supports JACK) is used by
> many users who are not audio professionals, yet it is arguably also "audio
> production software" (though I guess real professionals will find it too
> newbieish ;-) ). It's set up for PulseAudio by default (and before that it
> was trying to use OSS by default - yuck!). A tool like qsynth is also an
> interesting example: that's a frontend for a MIDI software synthesizer. It
> can be used to just play MIDIs or it can be used for audio production.
> Right now its Fedora package is set up for JACK by default, though it can
> be set to use ALSA (and then works just fine with the PulseAudio ALSA
> plugin). What should those tools do? Try to autodetect what server is
> running? As long as we have mutually exclusive sound servers, there will
> probably always be tools which do the wrong thing by default. :-(

If the user hasn't set a preference, such as on the first run, use Jack
if it's running, otherwise fall back on Pulse, otherwise fall back on
ALSA. Easy. There should be a simple obvious UI (Not hidden in the !@#
$ing preferences) that clearly indicates the current output and allows
you to dynamically change the output if it chooses wrong, with a sticky
preference for the next time.
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