Pulseaudio *sigh*

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

there is a serious problem with Pulseaudio being installed by default
for Kubuntu since Jaunty.

Since this happened, we (the people who give Kubuntu, KDE and/or
Amarok support) spend a lot of our time in the support channels,
forums and mailing list giving instructions on how to get sound
working on KDE, as it definitely doesn't work well with the Xine
backend.

Please consider a few facts:

- KDE doesn't use Pulseaudio at all, there is not a single application
that is meant to work with it by default,
- Gstreamer in it's current state is not working well with Phonon
neither, even if the Trolls have made some progress lately, it's not
working nearly as well as Xine so far,
- the couple Phonon + Xine works well and hardly gives any trouble in KDE,
- Pulseaudio apparently only works correctly in combination with Gstreamer,
- Amarok and Dragonplayer (as well as Kaffeine AFAIK) very often don't
play sound when Pulseaudio is installed, and this seems to happen for
many Jaunty users, who tend to be quite frustrated by that experience.

Shouldn't Kubuntu work by default for most of the users? Well, it
doesn't, and it is a frequent reason for people to either abandon
Amarok or KDE or even change distribution... which is certainly
totally counterproductive!

Even if the idea behind Pulseaudio is interesting, it's implementation
is far from perfect (and I am polite here....) I have the impression
to be back in the old times where we had to struggle with
arts....*shudder*

I strongly suggest to make Pulseaudio an optional installation for
Kubuntu in Karmic. It is a serious hindrance to the KDE experience,
and I do not speak only about Amarok. Please, take advice from the KDE
people on what should be a default sound installation before deciding
for a Pulseaudio+Gstreamer couple to be default. Of course if
Gstreamer and Pulseaudio are both ready and fixed to work correctly
with Phonon and the KDE applications, no problem, but so far it's not
the case.


Regards, Myriam.

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