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Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALSA?
Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 2:55 pm
by BrunoMiranda
Hi folks!
Although Pulse Audio is working fine, I'd like to purge it and replace it with ALSA. The thing is that if I try to uninstall Pulse Audio, apt tells me that Cinnamon will be uninstalled too!
sudo apt purge pulseaudio*
The following packages will be uninstalled:
cinnamon* cinnamon-bluetooth* cinnamon-control-center* cinnamon-screensaver*
gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio* gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio* libcanberra-pulse* nemo*
nemo-fileroller* nemo-share* pulseaudio* pulseaudio-module-bluetooth*
pulseaudio-module-x11* pulseaudio-utils*
Of course the Cinnamon desktop and Nemo are basic needed features... So I is there a way I can purge Pulse Audio and replace it with ALSA without breaking the system?
Thanks!
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 2:44 pm
by crossroads
Hello,
Follow this link. It may help.
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=70675
Granted it is dated to Mint 10, (May work with earlier or later versions, not tested.)
Not sure why you can't have Pulse Audio + ALSA. Just run ALSA on the front end. From
http://askubuntu.com/questions/157931/u ... -with-alsa
This seems to work, though you must understand that it isn't replacing pulseaudio with alsa but just removing pulseaudio(the front-end).
sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio
However alsa still needs a graphical user interface for you to easily communicate with it say goodbye to the easy integrated indicator that Ubuntu comes with
sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 3:09 pm
by Flemur
Edit: The easiest & safest thing would probably be to not have pulseaudio start at boot - see the 'startup manager' or whatever it's called. You might have reconfigure alsa afterwards, or change the audio settings on your audio apps. (You don't really 'replace' pulse with alsa; pulse uses alsa, and without pulse the apps talk to alsa directly, w/o going thru pulse).
FWIW, I've done what you're describing a couple of times, but could uninstall pulseaudio without problems...and I also end up reinstalling it. (pulse lets you play more than one sound at a time, and it's easy to do 'record what I hear').
sudo apt purge pulseaudio*
The following packages will be uninstalled:
cinnamon* cinnamon-bluetooth* cinnamon-control-center* cinnamon-screensaver* ...
That's kinda bogus.
Try
$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
(not purge, no '*')
Or, in synaptic, try unmarking the things you want to keep.
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 10:47 am
by BrunoMiranda
Hey Flemur, thanks for your kind help!
Try
$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
(not purge, no '*')
Or, in synaptic, try unmarking the things you want to keep.
It still wants to remove:
cinnamon cinnamon-bluetooth cinnamon-control-center cinnamon-screensaver
libcanberra-pulse nemo nemo-fileroller nemo-share pulseaudio
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-x11
Yes, it seems to be bogus, yes...
Ah well, I guess I can always keep Pulseaudio, it's working fine and this is not critical at all.
I just thought other people would want to do this too and we might help out.
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 1:20 am
by ibrahimansari
BrunoMiranda wrote:Hey Flemur, thanks for your kind help!
Try
$ sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
(not purge, no '*')
Or, in synaptic, try unmarking the things you want to keep.
It still wants to remove:
cinnamon cinnamon-bluetooth cinnamon-control-center cinnamon-screensaver
libcanberra-pulse nemo nemo-fileroller nemo-share pulseaudio
pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pulseaudio-module-x11
Ah. Crazy.
Yes, it seems to be bogus, yes...
Ah well, I guess I can always keep Pulseaudio, it's working fine and this is not critical at all.
I just thought other people would want to do this too and we might help out.
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 9:54 am
by Hoser Rob
No, you shouldn't purge pulseaudio. This is from a blog by a ubuntu dev:
http://voices.canonical.com/david.henni ... our-audio/
which has some hints as to how to disable pulse instead of removing it.
I used to use cinnamon and never ever had any problems with pulseaudio. It sounded great out of the box (as it did with mint 17 xfce which replaced it). The only thing I do is to make sure all pulse & alsa default sample rates are 44.1K so my music doesn't get resampled.
Alsa is basically the kernel level of linux audio. Pulse (or any other layer like OSS) is on top of that layer. Linux audio has too many layers.
Re: Mint17 Cinnamon - How can I replace Pulse Audio with ALS
Posted: Sun Nov 01, 2015 12:53 pm
by BrunoMiranda
I keep Pulseaudio on my main machine mostly because of Skype, because (correct me if I'm wrong or outdated) Skype does not support Alsa anymore. So, if you want to use Skype, you need to have Pulseaudio.
My personal opinion, nothing wrong with it. I just wanted to remove it because Alsa seems to perform better and has a coat with less onion-layers.
This performance issue is not a problem on my beefier i3 machine, but on my soon-to-be-retired Intel Classmate with a Celeron 900MHz CPU, I could tell the difference between having a jerky experience with Pulseaudio and a just fine one with Alsa. Hence this post.
Now on my "new" "fix-it-and-you-can-keep-it" Acer Aspire One, with a Intel Atom N280 CPU, I'm running LMDE2 Betsy MATE edition with Pulseadio kicked out. I've installed Skype on it but with Alsa I had no sound, microphone or camera detected on Skype, so I've done the right thing - purged Skype!
