pulseaudio needs to go

[Bonsaii]

Hi,

There are numerous threads about how and why pulseaudio sucks (pardon my French).

I am struggling with audio issues for many months. My speakers go mute for no reason.
I have spent endless hours searching for a solution. I did re-installs,
deleted and removed programs and parts, this has been a nightmare.

Nobody had or offered a solution.
The comments have always been: Must be the hardware.

Error message did not lead to anything.
Until now. Today I got this:
"[0x1953ca8] freetype spu text error: Breaking unbreakable line"

and a search lead to this:

http://deb-multimedia.org/lurker/message/20120607.141801.22a37fbd.en.html

Not a fix, but proof of the root of the problem is here:
http://charliemeyer.net/blog/2011/10/fix-for-sound-stop-working-randomly-on-ubuntu-11-04/

With that sound works again, for a minute or two.

Can we please, please throw out this crappy, unicorns, rainbows up piece of software called pulseaudio?
Or can we please at least NOT make it mandatory, part of the default applications/desktop environment?
Please, let's get rid of pulseaudio, it is a major cause of problems.

Thanks,
Bonsaii

[bigj231]

At least the devs have a sense of humor...
It does have it's pluses though, but none that I can think of right now. And TBH, I've not had a recent problem with pulse. *Goes off to find a wooden object to beat on the keyboard with*

[Bonsaii]

In case another reason to NOT integrate pulseaudio into cinnamon is needed:

Today I did a re-install of the pulseaudio package,
because some people were lucky,
and that solved their audio problems.

In my case, it broke my whole system. No more x-session. Nada. Dead.
The error message was something like "pulseaudio overwrites 0, 1, 6 ..."
No, I had not changed repositories, source.list, or anything else.

I had to do a complete new installation.
Usually that takes 15 minutes.
Due to Update Pack 5 it took hours.

A warm thank you to the "nice developers of pulseaudio"
for stealing another 4 hours of my life.

[squeezy]

Since my primary use for my computer is a small home studio, I use Ardour and Jack. Pulse gets in the way big time in a system like that. For the last LMDE/MATE build I did, I rewrote the mint-meta-debian-mate package to make mate-settings-daemon-pulse and mate-media-pulse optional with their gstreamer counterparts. Now I'm able to wipe pulseaudio and not blow the MATE meta package away.

[Bonsaii]

Dear Squeezy,

How can I motivate you, to do the same for Cinnamon?
Please? Pretty please? Pwwwwwwwwwwweese???

If you need a guinea pig, I'd volunteer.

[squeezy]

Dear Squeezy,

How can I motivate you, to do the same for Cinnamon?
Please? Pretty please? Pwwwwwwwwwwweese???

If you need a guinea pig, I'd volunteer.

I'll take a look at it but I can't promise anything. That last package mod I did was my first! I'm no programmer by any stretch of the imagination. I know Cinnamon has a lot more GNOME dependencies than MATE does and the pulseaudio requirement might be (probably is) much deeper than just the meta package.

[Bonsaii]

Please, please, please.

I went to the "Perfect PulseAudio Setup":
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar ... rfectSetup
and spent another couple of hours setting up pulseaudio.
It is a (very bad) joke.

Lets see, one is supposed to configure audio programs,
video programs, communication programs.
Mplayer/Mplayer2, Gnome Player, VLC, Gstreamer,
Gecko Media Player, Alsa, Esound, totem, ...

But most config information/locations are wrong.
Because the instructions are from ... 2009.
How is that supposed to work in a rolling distro?

If I want to go through editing a gazillion config files,
wouldn't I be using ArchLinux, Gentoo or LFS?

PulseAudio has been breaking sound for over a decade.
It will never be up-to-date. It will never work out of the box.

Please, LMDE developers, make pulseaudio removable.

Thank you!

[elboulangero]

+1
Using linux as a home studio, I use Jack + ALSA. Pulseaudio is just a pain in the ass for this usage. If it could be made optional, it would be nice.

[Fajah]

Nobody had or offered a solution. The comments have always been: Must be the hardware.

I'm by no means a Linux or audio expert, but my experience is that hardware has something to do with the overall audio experience. The external USB sound card that I was using without a problem in Windows (which had it's own mixer) was not working up to speed in Linux. I couldn't get it to record using Line In as an example. None of the Linux based mixers would work with it and I must have spent hours trying all sorts of solutions.

I then decided to purchase an M-Audio Fast Track external USB audio interface which was very reasonably priced. Of course, the sales person knew nothing about Linux so I figured that if it didn't work, I'd return it, try something else, and keep doing this until I found something that did. The M-Audio device works great and was as plug and play as you can get. I have no output/Input issues at all.

In my sound preferences, I have my PC mic set to my Lenovo T-61's internal sound card. Output is set to the Fast Track. In Audacity, my default audio host is Alsa however, anything I plug into Fast Track gets recorded without any settings changes.

So IMO, Pulse may be crappy but I wouldn't dismiss looking at a hardware solution as well.