[PlanetCCRMA] Getting rid of or disabling Pulse a good idea?

Paul Coccoli pcoccoli at gmail.com
Fri May 22 10:08:47 PDT 2009


On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Mike Mazarick <mazarick at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> I've noticed that many/most other people go thru the same basic learning
> curve I did.  They eliminate Pulse Audio almost as a matter of course for
> any serious audio work with Linux.   I can see a lot of benefits to Pulse
> for the average user, but it seems to cause nothing but confusion and
> headaches for the serious user.   I would imagine it is mainly because Pulse
> audio wants to make the latency as long as possible in order to maintain
> quality, and the composer/musician would prefer latency to be as short as
> possible and still maintain an acceptable level of sound quality.
>
> I would recommend either disabling or removing Pulse Audio from the standard
> distribution for CCRMA and enabling/installing it for the cases where it is
> needed.
>
> Any other thoughts/suggestions/opinions?

I don't have any issues with PA here.  As long as I use pasuspender to
start jackd, PA does not interfere.  when not running jack, it looks
to me to add a nice layer on top of ALSA (one of the ugliest
subsystems ever).

I did have to edit /etc/pulse/default.pa as mentioned in
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206868, otherwise I
heard 'skipping' during media playback in gstreamer apps (possibly
others, too).

I think a lot of people over-react to pulse, possibly exaggerating its
issues.  I fully support anything that shields me from the ALSA (jack,
pulse, gstreamer, whatever).



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