For home recording I have tried several times to use Linux I started using Suse from version 6 tyo openSuse 11.4 for work.
Using linux for serious audio recording I gave up after trying different versions, because it simply lacks support for the (external) sound cards I have .
But also for normal use such as watching videos using the default soundcard, there’s no guarantee that everything runs smooth out of the box.
Recently I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 7, that I made dual boot with openSuse 11.4 and guess NO sound.
The laptop has two soundcards, one HDA for the standard job and HDMI.
Selecting the default in Systems settings was already troublesome. When choosing the HDA soundcard to be used, it changed back to the other one after a reboot. Even when checking again because no sound was to hear, it had been reset.
From trying other distro’s. I knew that you will run into trouble when having multiple soundcards and Pulse was installed.
So I was a little disappointred that also openSuse 11.4 had installed Pulse by default.>:(
Although the idea behind Pulse seems to be good, it just cannot handle these situations. After disabling Pulse everything worked perfectly.
Personally I am convinced that adding an extra layer between the software that controls the hardware driver, is just asking for trouble, especially if the software, Pulse in this case, cannot handle multiple soundcards.
So my advice for the openSuse crew, if the package will installed, leave it disabled as default.
It will save a lot of openSuse users headaches from searching for solutions in case of having soundproblems.
From what I’ve read in these fora it seems that pulse has improved, and is worth experimenting with in 12.1 (I have it disabled in 11.4). Of course, it might depend on your hardware, so YMMV.
Who would provide such a guarantee? I doubt even MS does that with Win7 etc.
I would hazard a guess that the “two soundcards” configuration in a PC isn’t common enough to achieve “default” status. PulseAudio seems to be aimed at the majority of uncomplicated users, which surely justifies its position as default. I don’t believe openSUSE is alone in installing PulseAudio by default.
At the moment, running two sound cards could be classified as advanced use. Disabling PulseAudio is often the best solution for “advanced” or professional/studio users.
Actually, just starting jackd pushes pulseaudio off of the default audio device nowadays, and then you can connect other alsa devices into jack using “alsa_in” or “alsa_out” commands. The alsa device to be used by jack can be specified at start up if the defaults aren’t good enough. And I think there’s a way to sink pulseaudio into jack as a client, not sure exactly what the intended use case for that is though. Oh maybe playing youtube videos of Thelonious through your keyboard amp. Stop jack and pulseaudio pops right back up.
I have pulse running on 4 PCs at home (all now on openSUSE-11.4) with no problems. But then I do not use HDMI , nor do I have 7.1 surround sound (I only have 5.1 surround sound on one PC and 2.0 sound on the remainder).
I’ve never been able to reproduce the problems other’s have reported with pulse, except I did find if I installed openSUSE-11.4 (and later 12.1) with my webcam installed, the openSUSE installer would treat my webcam as the primary sound device and mess up the sound. That is mess up the sound until I installed pulse audio volume control (pavucontrol) and tuned it with that pavucontrol application, after which sound worked GREAT with pulse (for me).
Since having pulse installed I’ve been able to do things I could NOT do before (because I refused to learn how to use Jack) :
on a PC with 2 sound devices, send sound from 2 different media applications to each of these devices at the same time
send audio from 2 applications to the same sound device at the same time
send audio from 1 application to two different sound devices at the same time
record audio from 1 mic and have it sent to 2 applications at the same time
record audio from 2 different mics and have each sent to the same application
record audio from 2 different mics and have each sent to a different application
there are probably many more things one can do with pulse, but I confess I was just playing and did not need to do any of the above on a serious basis.
I definitely could NOT do the above without pulse. I know user’s who run ‘jack’ who claim they can do the same and more, but they also concede learning Jack requires effort.
Its unfortunate pulse appears to work great for some users (such as me on 4 PCs with completely different hardware) and not work for other users who also have different hardware.
When one does not see the same problems themselves, and when on is NOT infront of someone else’s PC, it is VERY difficult to produce any sort of specific advice. I do try at times to give such advice, but I also fail a lot in the advice I provide. Such is GNU/Linux and life, I guess.
On 27/11/11 12:46, consused wrote:
> I would hazard a guess that the “two soundcards” configuration in a PC
> isn’t common enough to achieve “default” status. PulseAudio seems to be
> aimed at the majority of uncomplicated users, which surely justifies its
> position as default. I don’t believe openSUSE is alone in installing
> PulseAudio by default.
You don’t need two sound-cards to get a “two sound-card” configuration.
My video card, an nVidia Geforce 210, is also regarded as a sound card
by the hardware detection.
With Pulse-Audio activated, I get a message that my real sound-card
doesn’t work and also get asked if I want to remove it. This often
happens as the login chimes are sounding, generated by the non-working
sound card. Bah!
–
Graham Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 11.4 (64-bit); KDE 4.7.3; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nVidia driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306
Yes, also not “default” status, hybrid video/sound cards seem to have caused issues.
Like @oldcpu, I too haven’t had the kind of problems with PulseAudio as posted by quite a few users in the forum. I don’t have any machines with two soundcards. However I haven’t yet tried to use HDMI on my notebook.
That’s right for openSUSE 12.1 and for Tumbleweed (11.4 based), both having jack 1.9.7 installed along with KDE, but not so for jack 1.9.6 on 11.4 standard. The latter pushes pulseaudio off, but here it doesn’t “pop right back up”, leaving no sound and KMix at the alsa level/layer. A user logout and login cleared it, although one could probably reset via the commandline.
You are right, pulseaudio is not productivity ready, despite already a lot of work was done. So, skype was unable to find my logitech external microphone. In our distribution it seems impossible to uninstall pulseaudio, but is possible to disable it. I had to do so, in addition I am a bit suspicious about the latency of this server. To disable pulseaudio just type as root
setup-pulseaudio --disable
and reboot
good luck
I have Skype working with pulse audio on three differnt PCs with openSUSE 11.4 and two different PCs with 12.1. I can not produce the problems of those who find pulse does not work. I am 5 for 5 in success. Pulse ‘just works’. If one can not produce the problems of others despite trying on many different PCs, what can one do?
>
> Capodastro;2413419 Wrote:
>> You are right, pulseaudio is not productivity ready, despite already a
>> lot of work was done. So, skype was unable to find my logitech external
>> microphone. In our distribution it seems impossible to uninstall
>> pulseaudio, but is possible to disable it. I had to do so, in addition I
>> am a bit suspicious about the latency of this server. To disable
>> pulseaudio just type as root
>> setup-pulseaudio --disable
>> and reboot
>> good luck
>
> I have Skype working with pulse audio on three differnt PCs with
> openSUSE 11.4 and two different PCs with 12.1. I can not produce the
> problems of those who find pulse does not work. I am 5 for 5 in
> success. Pulse ‘just works’. If one can not produce the problems of
> others despite trying on many different PCs, what can one do?
>
i’ve found that skype does work with pulse, but it’s a struggle sometimes.
i had to remove the ~/.Skype directory several times to get skype to
recognize my audio setup, sometimes i had to dis- and again enable pulse
before it would work, and sometimes i had to fiddle with pavucontrol for
20 min before succeeding.
often it’s not obvious to me what i finally did, i guess there’s audio
settings saved in caches that don’t always get refreshed, and generally
it’s a bit of a mystery. but, in the end, i always get things
working…usually just a little more fiddling required in case it doesn’t.
and, with my current installation (oS 12.1) i ended up using skype
2.1.0.81 rather than the latest version, because i got that one working
first. i’ve seen others in these forums who were not using the latest
skype version, too.
I had a case on my mother’s PC (openSUSE-11.3 without pulse) and my PC (openSUSE-11.3 without pulse), where Skype would crash immediately after starting. It turned out the solution was to delete an xml file, and it also turned out that MS-Windows users had a similar problem.
Then later on my mother’s openSUSE-11.3 PC (again which does NOT have pulse) the problem came back and the ultimate solution was to remove apparmor as it was causing a permissions problem with Skype.
I have not observed those 11.3 problems (with Skype and no pulse) on my openSUSE-11.4/12.1 setups (which have pulse). However in the case of these problems not being present (on a PC with pulse), I do not think pulse was a factor.
IMHO a lot of the problems that users have with pulse, is it is conceptually new, and its configuration/concepts are new to a lot of ‘old in the tooth’ GNU/Linux users, and it causes them problems.
I know I avoided pulse as long as I thought I could, and I only played with pulse (a LOT) on a sandbox PC until I became comfortable enough to use pulse on my main PC’s main partition (and on the other PCs in our apartment). And now that I am a bit more familiar with it, I find it works well for me.
