pulseaudio == disaster ??

Kelly Miller lightsolphoenix at gmail.com
Wed Nov 14 13:39:04 UTC 2007


On Nov 13, 2007 2:56 PM, David A. De Graaf <dad at datix.us> wrote:

> 1 - Apparently pulseaudio is a daemon that must be running all the
> time, just to produce the simplest sound.


And in that respect it is no different than arts, esd, and a bunch of other
such systems.  If you want to run directly on ALSA, you can just turn
PulseAudio off.

2 - Sounds work only while running gnome, because only gnome
> knows how to start the daemon.  I don't use gnome; I use XFCE4.
> Why would starting this sound daemon be assigned to a window manager,
> of all things?
> What perverted software architect makes using the sound system
> dependent on a window manager - any window manager?


Uh, it's not.  I got PulseAudio to start automatically on XFCE4 using
Autostarted Applications.  It really isn't that hard.

3 - There are no man pages.  There are 15 packages named "*pulse*" -
> and not a single man page.


pulseaudio --help ;)

5 - The http://www.pulseaudio.org/ web page is a paean to the wonders of
> this new system, but has precious little instruction on how to
> actually make it work.  The topic "Command Line Interface" seems to
> address this issue, listing many commands that can be used in
> configuration scripts.  At the end is an example:
>
> Example Configuration Script
>
> Mark the following script as executable (chmod +x) and run it for a
> sensible PulseAudio configuration.
>
>    #!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
>
>    # Create autoload entries for the device drivers
>    add-autoload-sink output module-alsa-sink device=plughw:0,0 rate=48000
> sink_name=output
>    add-autoload-sink output2 module-oss device=/dev/dsp1 record=0
> sink_name=output2
>    add-autoload-sink combined module-combine master=output slaves=output2
> sink_name=combined
>
>        < remaining commands snipped >
>
> Clearly, this instruction is not to be taken literally;  the script
> contains commands that do not exist in Linux.
>
> Rather, I assume the script is meant to replace /etc/pulse/default.pa,
> which is purportedly used to configure a starting pulseaudio daemon,
> so I tried that, and ran
>    pulseaudio --system --log-target=syslog
> expecting to have the daemon initialized and to hear 'startup3.wav'.
>
> Instead, /var/log/messages receives a list of error messages, eg
>
>  Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module-alsa-sink.c: Error
>    opening PCM device plughw:0,0: No such device
>  Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module.c: Failed to load
>    module "module-alsa-sink" (argument: "device=plughw:0,0 rate=48000
>    sink_name=output"): initialization failed.
>  Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module-combine.c: Invalid
>    master sink 'output'
>  Nov 13 13:32:18 datbird pulseaudio[2693]: module.c: Failed to load
>    module "module-combine" (argument: "master=output slaves=output2
>    sink_name=combined"): initialization failed.


First of all, I've noticed that using --system ALWAYS throws the "Error
opening PCM device" error, so don't use it.  I had the same error you're
getting, and fixed it by using module hal-detect to get the system to find
the ALSA objects.  I'll post my config file here when I get home and can
look at it.

Clearly. I'm missing some important info.
> What is a "PCM device plughw:0,0", and why don't I have one???


The PCM device is listed in ALSA; it's usually hw:0 by default.  Again, use
module hal-detect and the system will find the entries for you.

> Sorry, but I think pulseaudio isn't ready for prime time, yet.


Your opinion.  I've got it working 100% on two Fedora systems and an
openSUSE system, and it works fantastic.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20071114/926d029f/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the fedora-list mailing list