Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Should Pulseaudio Die? What do you think?

Filed under
Linux

When I was installing and testing Mandriva 2010 Cooker (new development) releases this last Fall season, I kept having persistent problems with sound. Eventually, the advice in the Mandriva Cooker forum for KDE users became: "Disable Pulseaudio, and set Xine as the preferred back end over GStreamer (in the KDE multimedia settings).

Unlike the latest 'buntu, Mandriva does supply a checkbox in their Control Center Sound configuration utility to enable/disable Pulseaudio.

Then Mandriva 2010 final came out, and Pulseaudio more or less works, (and GStreamer works fine for the KDE back end). Some users report that flash videos have no sound with Pulseaudio enabled. Certainly there's some sound lag with Pulseaudio.

Today I was listening to the latest tllts podcast (The Linux Link Tech Show). Tllts member Patrick Davila started his "rant" segment, and said:

Quote:
Pulseaudio sucks. The experiment [with Pulseaudio] has gone far too long. It's time to admit that it's a f*ing failure and every implementation sucks. The guy who runs it [Pulseaudio]--any time anybody tries to talk to him, is very negative and tells you you're an idiot. Canonical should hire Paul Davis, the developer of Jack and Ardour and Jack should become the default sound daemon."

What do you think? I tend to agree with Davila, however Linux sound is not my area of expertise. But I've certainly been plagued and frustrated over the years with Linux sound issues, and Pulseaudio seems to make things worse.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

I use Sidux AMD64 with KDE

I use Sidux AMD64 with KDE 4.3 and I have a proper sound card - an M-Audio Revolution 5.1. I do not have any Pulseaudio installed. My sound works perfectly. In part this is because my sound card supports hardware mixing. KDE uses Phonon not Pulse.

Now, this week I built a second machine from old bits for the purpose of video editing. I wanted to try OpenShot so I installed Karmic Koala, as OpenShot requires Python 2.6 and so it will not run on anything Debian (yet). After installation I had no sound at all. The Pulseaudio controlled sound applet showed everything was working, but nothing emanated from the speakers. I installed Gnome Alsamixer and found that the output was not selected, a simple click of the mouse and music poured forth. To me the biggest fault here is Gnome using this new mixer applet instead of the traditional Alsa one. Ubuntu, or Gnome in general, have also removed the older Gnome Sound properties dialog with a Pulse based one. You can no longer change the default output easily. If it does not work there is now nowhere to go unless you are an experienced Linux user. I removed Pulseaudio as I had other issues with input from Aux (but that one was an ALSA issue), but in doing so lost the speaker applet. I disabled the onboard sound and put in a PCI sound card and reinstalled Pulseaudio and now it all works.

Is this the fault of Pulseaudo, Gnome or Ubuntu - or all of them. When Pulseaudio works it is a good tool, when it does not it is an utter pain. Unfortunately it seems to fail way too often for my liking. The failures are often simple and can be overcome with simple access to good Alsa based mixer. This then is the fault of Gnome and the distro builders. Bring back the old sound properties dialog and install Gnome Alsamixer by default. Give the noobs a fighting chance.

My last peeve is definitley distro based. Why is my sound constantly muted by updates? Not Sidux - the others. Why on earth would you set mute as the default? Ever?

enough ranting

It is junk.

I agree too. Pulse audio is junk just like udev, hal, dbus and polkit. Useless crap that don't work right.

Depends on the distro

I have an older Creative card that uses the snd-emu* drivers. It and PA (PulseAudio) work fine with certain distros, like Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10. It and PA don't work well with others, like Fedora 12 and openSUSE 11.2. In those distros, system sounds come out layered in static. Flash and other audio playback can sometimes be staticky as well. Why one distro gives me no problems while another does, I have no idea.

The reaction of the PulseAudio dev is as follows: "Regarding snd-emu*: Creative doesn't like Open Source -- there are no docs available. If you buy Creative it is hence a bit your own fault."

Fair enough, except the card works fine with ALSA. Why the difference? The PulseAudio dev again: "As long as you only play MP3 music directly on the device and use the traditional sound card interrupt based wakeups the bogus timing information the sound drivers export doesn't matter. That's why you won't notice this issue without PA but it becomes very visible (or audible...) when PA is used."

Whoopee.

PulseAudio can do all kinds of cool things, but I'd just like to have an alternative to using it. I've tried but I can't replace it with any other backend in openSUSE 11.2 and have working sound, even in KDE 3/4.

re: depends distro

Yeah, I had trouble with a creative card and opensuse 11.2 too. Sound would only come out of one of the four speakers. That didn't go over too well with me.

I haven't had too much trouble with most of others distros except that Flash sound wouldn't work in the latest Mandriva. The only solution really offered was to disable pulseaudio. That did indeed do the trick.

Distros' fault

Pay attention to what PulseAudio's dev has said many times. Ubuntu in particular, he argues, does a HUGE disservice to the reputation of PulseAudio.

re: Distros fault

Yes, Linux Excuses 101.

Whenever something sucks, blame everyone (the distro, the user, the girlscouts) but the monkey who codes it.

its every distro?

I've only read the horror stories of PA but I've no experience myself. However, its constantly repeated that it is the distros' fault in their implementations. Perhaps the developer needs to provide more-clear examples or documentation so that his product doesn't get such a bad reputation?

On the flip side, which distros are implementing this correctly according to the PA developer(s)?

PulseAudio...

I've been using Linux on and off for the past four years and since my first stab at it, everyone always suggest that I stay away from PulseAudio. Because of that, I've always stuck with Alsa. It works and it works great. I'm personally a fan of building minimal Debian systems and I've always relied Alsa for sound. Most of it is because I've heard nothing but bad stories about PulseAudio. Lots of promise but just as much letdown. Does this project really lack that much direction/ it clearly isn't moving forward if this debate is still going on four years later.

yep

Pulse audio is garbage. I actually do blame the distros a little bit. If the crap isn't tested and working on common hardware, why put it in a so called stable release.The developer can test it all he wants, can ask for testers, or keep it on his hard drive for all I care. When the major distros release new versions, something as basic as sound should work. Period. I suppose the community working together on improving what we already have working would be too much to ask.

PulseAudio

I'm going to be murdered for posting this, but I think we should all go back to OSS, with version 4 and later version 5. I'm on Arch, so I can pick and choose from the beginning what I want to use. I have tried PulseAudio, which seems to lag, ALSA works but it sounds weak, compared to sound in OSS4 and Windows 7. I dare say it sounds better in OSS4 than Windows 7. I even have a Creative card and it works better in OSS than the rest with BETA drivers. Granted I don't do any recording or anything complicated that doesn't involve listening to FLAC audio, movies and youtube, with a 5.1 surround system. Adding to this, OSS is so easy to configure, everything residing in /usr/lib/oss and while the wiki is not updated as often, it has the usual problems that I encountered listed and in the forums, there are friendly people who have helped me, up to the extent of modifying source code and recompiling OSS on Arch in order to get a USB sound card working. I know what the developer did in the past still makes some people angry or distrustful but I don't think that's going to happen again, everyone can make mistakes and I think if we show more support with development and testing, OSS can be the greatest thing for sound in Linux and all of *nix systems. Freebsd uses it, maybe a modified version but to me OSS is both user and developer friendly.

I have not tried JACK, but if that works good, I don't have any complaints. I just want to move to something that is not ALSA or Pulseaudio and more importantly, that it works as intended.

http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/index.php
http://www.4front-tech.com
http://www.opensound.com/wiki/index.php

I agree

I find PC-BSD with OSS has the best sound on my system. I should try this with Chakra. JACK sounds interesting as well.

I also agree with Anonymo

I read "State of Sound in Linux not so Sorry After All"

http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html

I switched Ubuntu to OSS and everything was better / cooler / easier. i.e. the sound quality was better, the user interface was nicer too. (Although there was no OSS HDMI driver at the time.)

I also have used OSS on Solaris. It was the exact same experience. I plugged in a USB DAC and viola! It just worked.

Pulse made me busy all this year

Hi. I don't know if pulse have to die, but I sure hate its guts. I work for an OEM company who sell various machines with Linux/KDE installed. Pulse failed on basically all the HW configs that I saw.

At home, here's what I have to say : Pulse is not ready. When I manage to get it to work, it hangs.

I totally agree with the guy who proposed to replace pulse with jack, maybe with a simple frontend ? Jack is the only software that I know of that actually aknowledge that a user can have more than ONE soundcard.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.