pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

Tom Horsley tom.horsley at att.net
Mon Mar 9 14:05:50 UTC 2009


On Mon, 09 Mar 2009 06:34:32 -0700
Suvayu Ali wrote:

> Not many have multiple cards, but most do have these multi-stream 
> capable audio hardware. They come in pretty handy if you actually use 
> your desktop as your primary home multimedia device.

Yep. The main reason I always remove pulseaudio is the apparent total
inability to send already encoded sound (like a DVD soundtrack) to the
SP/DIF optical output on my motherboard's sound interface. I spent
weeks decrypting the ALSA gibberish required to get this working,
then pulseaudio wiped out all the work. If it can do it, then it
needs a better mixer interface to show how to do it, if it can't do
it, it needs to be able to before it can replace ALSA for me.

In fact, I suspect what linux needs far more than pulseaudio is a layer
on top of ALSA that sorts all the hardware specific gibberish ALSA
names like "IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA" into something more meaningful
and provides some explanation for why I have 27 "simple" ALSA sound controls
when my motherboard has only 7 sound related connectors :-).




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