pulseaudio

[pwatk]

Sorry, didn't really explain myself very well. Instead of rebuilding the existing packages I'm just creating separate packages with the components I require to support Pulseaudio!

Thankfully all the things I require (the Pulseaudio plugins from gst-plugins-good and alsa-plugins and the volume control mixer and applet from gnome-media) can be installed independently of the parent packages so I can affectively isolate Pulseaudio (from a dependencies point of view) without harming anything else.

This way if you install gst-plugins-good, alsa-plugins (I'm building this too) or gnome-media you wont accidentally install Pulseaudio if you don't want it.

Does this make sense?

The packages I'm working on are here: http://people.salixos.org/pwatk/packages/pending/

[Shador]

Sorry, didn't really explain myself very well. Instead of rebuilding the existing packages I'm just creating separate packages with the components I require to support Pulseaudio!

Thankfully all the things I require (the Pulseaudio plugins from gst-plugins-good and alsa-plugins and the volume control mixer and applet from gnome-media) can be installed independently of the parent packages so I can affectively isolate Pulseaudio (from a dependencies point of view) without harming anything else.

This way if you install gst-plugins-good, alsa-plugins (I'm building this too) or gnome-media you wont accidentally install Pulseaudio if you don't want it.

Does this make sense?

I perfectly understood what you were saying already previously. Nevertheless I think that before accepting a package with such an impact (sound system affects a lot of other software/hardware) there probably should be more than the usual testing and I'd like another opinion.

[gapan]

I see no harm in having pulseaudio related packages available, as long as they don't conflict with existing packages, but I wouldn't want it installed by default. By the way, I can see pulseaudio is already available from slackbuilds.org.

[pwatk]

I see no harm in having pulseaudio related packages available, as long as they don't conflict with existing packages, but I wouldn't want it installed by default. By the way, I can see pulseaudio is already available from slackbuilds.org.

Cool! I'm not planning to add these packages to our slapt-src repo, there's no point. I'm going to wait until our next major release and submit them then.

[davidwillis]

Pulseaudio is one reason I have not installed salix on my main computer. I need pulse to be able to record sounds correctly from my mic, and from system sounds. I tried to get it working with alsa for a long time, but then when I used pulse it took me no time at all to get it working. I know a lot of people hate pulse, but I think it is the best thing that has happened to sound in linux.

[pwatk]

I think the common misconceptions about pulseaudio stem from the Ubuntu devs making a complete fudge of it when pushing it out to the masses in an LTS release (Hardy?).

[GJones]

IMO it's still a complete fudge - in Ubuntu 11.04, you can still see it hogging CPU on occasion.

OT: I think it would be nice if the ALSA devs came up with a replacement for dmix. I'm thinking something like OpenBSD's aucat, a sound server daemon with easily adjustable buffering (and other parameters). Unfortunately this will probably never happen.

[thenktor]

OT: I think it would be nice if the ALSA devs came up with a replacement for dmix. I'm thinking something like OpenBSD's aucat, a sound server daemon with easily adjustable buffering (and other parameters). Unfortunately this will probably never happen.

What for?

[davidwillis]

All I want is something that I can easily set up to control sources and sinks. For me to be able to record system sounds and mic sounds at the same time I need to set up a null sink, and then send two loopbacks to it using these lines in /etc/pulse/default.pa

load-module module-null-sink sink_name=RMDsound
load-module module-loopback sink=RMDsound source=alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor
load-module module-loopback sink=RMDsound source=alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo

I have yet to figure out how to do that without pulse.

I need that because I do webinars over the internet(through firefox), and I record them with recordmydesktop. I want it to record from my mic, as well as other people talking through the web browser. Also I don't want my voice coming out my speakers. So far this is the only way I have been able to do it. I used to be able to do it with alsa using a loopback function, but it echoed my voice through my speakers, and then when I updated one time the loopback function was removed from alsa. After that I found pulse, which works much better (no echo, and much more control).

[thenktor]

Hmm, I don't know if I fully understand what you want to do. If you just want to record system sound and mic in one stream you just have to activate something like PCM and mic on alsamixer's capture page. If you don't want to output your mic on your speakers you have to deactivate it on alsamixer's playback page.
Every other mixer should work fine, too.