Sound faults in Version 2.3.0 w/ Debian Squeeze

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Valorie Zimmerman at 29/03/10 10:57 did gyre and gimble:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Valorie Zimmerman at 28/03/10 11:06 did gyre and gimble:
>>> I know you've gotten some advice to stop or remove PulseAudio, but
>>> I've got the opposite advice. Put PA at the top of the list of your
>>> output devices -- ALL output devices. It can work well, but it does
>>> not play well with others. I had various annoying sound problems until
>>> I did this, and now everything works perfectly.
>>
>> This certainly used to be the case, but quite some time ago I did work
>> to properly integrate Phonon and PulseAudio.
>>
>> As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you should ask your distribution
>> to include the latest phonon from gitorious and build it against
>> pulseaudio headers/libs for full integration. You should also make sure
>> you have pulseaudio 0.9.21+extra patches from the stable-queue branch
>> (most distros I know ship this). With this and the start-pulseaudio-kde
>> script and you should have a very nicely integrated Phonon+PA and avoid
>> the configuration problems that trip up a lot of people at the first
>> hurdle for which their "solution" is to remove PA.
>>
>> Lots more info on my blog linked below.
> 
> I only advise people to remove it as a last resort. And just as often,
> I tell people to install it if they lack it. However, the advice to
> move it to the top of the list nearly always solves the problem. :-)

Yup, the "move to the top of the list" is certainly good advice when the
phonon build is either older or not built against PA headers (I hope I
didn't imply otherwise :)).

I've actually had code in Mandriva for >1.5 years now that basically did
this automatically and gave the user no option in the matter if their
system was configured to use PA (e.g. it only showed the singular PA
device an no others). Of course users could choose not to use PA if they
prefer and the list becomes fully populated. Because of this approach I
don't think I've experienced any major configuration problems due to
this issue in Mandriva.

I just wish other distros had adopted this approach a while back too.
It's ultimately one of the reasons that motivated me to make my solution
"official" and push the code into phonon that tests for PA properly
rather than relying on Mandriva-specific configuration checks.

With the full support, it now shows all the devices known by PA and lets
you order them appropriately. IOW, the fact that PA is running is
totally hidden from the user and the device lists are the full
compliment of local, USB, network, bluetooth, uPnP and airtunes devices.
Which is nice :)

http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/10/kde-plus-pulseaudio-does-not-equal-sucks/

> Kubuntu offers 1:0.9.19. I'll try to ping a packager with your advice.

I believe there are several builds (for Ubuntu anyway) that have 0.9.21
available, but of course the problem is that the phonon package needs to
be built against the updated PA headers too... so that complicates
things in this regard. I don't really know any Kbuntu guys dealing with
this, but know a couple of the Ubuntu folks involved with upstream PA
stuff. I'll mention this to them, but not sure they're really the right
folks to ask.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]