[PlanetCCRMA] Pulseaudio and qjackctl

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano nando at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Tue May 26 17:45:49 PDT 2009


On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 15:50 -0600, David Nielson wrote:
> > Pulse addresses a real problem: how to get regular desktop applications
> > (including the desktop itself) to cooperate and access a single sound
> > card in an orderly manner. ALSA won't do it and there are no other
> > alternatives AFAIK. Jack is not the answer either, it was not designed
> > to solve that problem. Pulse or something that fills that need is
> > needed. If somebody wants to design yet another system (and there have
> > been _many_ tries in the past) then they should go ahead and do it, but
> > I would strongly suggest that they spend that time in helping with Pulse
> > development instead.
> This all seems silly to me; Jack, IMO, has the potential to solve the 
> problems Pulse solves in a much more elegant way, plus the fact that it 
> already has a large installed user-base and is highly developed. All it 
> would take is this:
> 
> 1. An emulation layer (which I think already exists) so that OSS / ALSA 
> apps can be run through Jack without modification

I think there is or was an ALSA plugin. AFAIK it never worked very
well. 

> 2. A smart mixer application with a few sets of inputs (mono, stereo, 
> surround, etc.) that intelligently figures out how to mix / mux / manage 
> audio formats and direct them the best way for the end user's current 
> speaker setup
> 
> 3. Jackd becomes a "service" that's part of the default runlevel 3 and 5 
> setup, and keeping it alive is managed by something only slightly 
> smarter than qjackctl.
> 
> If I were a coder, I would go ahead and write this and submit it to 
> Fedora along with a thorough list of grievances against PulseAudio, 
> starting with "IT SUCKS."

Well, you may be right but we'll never know :-)
As they say, the proof is in the code...

I am a coder and I suspect (actually _know_ :-) that it is not as easy
as you think it is. And I'm not convinced that Jack would be up to the
task either. It is _not_ designed for that sort of application. 

-- Fernando




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