Pulseaudio *sigh*

[Ian Monroe]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Martin T.
Sandsmark<sandsmark at samfundet.no> wrote:
> Just to clarify; I'm not even a Kubuntu user (I use ArchLinux), just a
> “concerned citizen”, so to speak.
>
> On Monday 22. June 2009 01:48:48 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
>> 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'm just wondering exactly which problem is it that Pulseaudio is supposed to
> solve? I thought that people understood (after aRts) that adding a sound
> server to the audio stack wasn't the way to go (after all, aRts did pretty
> much everything PA tries to do, and from what I've seen so far, it did it
> better). Granted, my experience with PulseAudio is limited to helping people
> uninstall it, and seeing everything suddenly work like it's supposed to. Is
> there some magic killer feature it provides that I'm unaware of? (I'm talking
> for normal end users, I have no doubt that PulseAudio is excellent for thin
> clients.)

It does have better power consumption, or so I heard it claimed.
Network transparency.

> Also, I don't think using the gstreamer Phonon backend as default is a very
> good idea either. Since Qt moved to gitorious (3 months ago), there hasn't
> been a single commit to it in their git repo. And there's only been trivial
> commits in the KDE svn repo in the same timespan (mostly by scripty, one
> compile fix by thiago, a one-line patch and partial support for cdda added by
> jbache). There might have been a sudden surge of activity right before that,
> but I kind of doubt that.

I think this is the biggest problem.

Getting xine to work well with pulseaudio is probably a lot more work
then getting phonon-gstreamer to not suck. And phonon-gstreamer not
sucking would be nice for several other reasons.

Ian