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Pulseaudio and Karmic

post #1 of 14
12/4/09 at 5:36am
Thread Starter 
Arrrgh!!! I was just going to post yesterday as to how smooth my upgrade to Karmic went. That was, until I tried to get my bluetooth headset working with the new Pulseaudio.

The problems I'm seeing:
1. A2DP doesn't work with Pulseaudio. I know it worked with the earlier distribution. I get sound, but there is a lot of choppiness (1-2 sec blocks) and delay. Plenty of kernel messages about skipping. In plain headset mode it works fine.

2. I have to manually set audio to go through my headphones when using Skype. I thought Pulse would let multiple apps access the sound subsystems simultaneously. Often even the manual switchover fails and I have to disconnect and reconnect the headphones.

I have seen bug reports regarding the first problem - what's bizarre (to me) is that Pulseaudio at one time was going to use RT priority in the kernel. At some point they changed course, but I think the skipping is related to that. My system has plenty of horsepower to handle the audio. The second problem is not as annoying and I suspect it can be resolved by config.

Since I'd like to continue using Skype, I think I have two options:

1. Fiddle around with Pulse and try to get it working. Some fixes suggest using rtkit. I would need to research that but I don't think that's the issue.

2. Remove Pulseaudio entirely and use an older version of Skype that talks to ALSA.

So, to end this ramble, does anyone have any idea for how to safely remove or disable Pulseaudio? Maddeningly, it's linked in to gnome now and just removing it breaks the desktop from what I've read. Or, if you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!
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post #2 of 14
12/6/09 at 4:37pm
I don't know why Ubuntu insists on making Pulseaudio default -- it's way more trouble than it's worth. See here for removing it in Karmic: http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/sh....php?p=8284273
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post #3 of 14
12/6/09 at 7:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mythmaster View Post

I don't know why Ubuntu insists on making Pulseaudio default -- it's way more trouble than it's worth. See here for removing it in Karmic: http://ubuntu-ky.ubuntuforums.org/sh....php?p=8284273

I think in the long run, PulseAudio might be a Good Thing-

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/1...tics?art_pos=1

but I agree, in the near term, there probably is no need for normal home users to have Pusle Audio active.

The concept and community of Ubuntu are excellent, but the rubber-meets-the-road execution of Ubuntu releases sometimes makes you scratch your head wondering how they made some of the decisions they do, often prematurely as is the case with Pulseaudio.

The slashdot discussion I linked above appears to have a lot of positive discussion about OSS4- anyone here using it? I though Alsa was pretty good for media PC use...

"
Re:This is the Sound of (Score:5, Informative)
by Runaway1956 (1322357) * on Monday October 19, @05:51AM (#29791867) Homepage Journal

You should be using OSS4. I put up with the Pulse idiosyncracies until my virtual machines spazzed out. Started researching my options, and found that Open Sound was moving past the deprecated OSS3, which wasn't much better than Pulse.

Since I've compiled and installed Open Sound, I have no more sound problems, period. Everything works the way it's supposed to.

If Pulse and Alsa get their **** together, fine. If not, I'm a devoted OSS fan. Before anyone runs off to experiment, be warned - you will probably have to spend a few minutes purging Alsa from your system. There is no co-existence of the two, at least not on Ubuntu. If you're not a Linux guru, plan on following a how-to, and plan on spending a couple hours getting it right.

http://www.opensound.com/ [opensound.com]
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound [ubuntu.com]"
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post #4 of 14
12/6/09 at 9:03pm
You might wanna try Mandriva 2010.0 where Pulseaudio seems to be working very well for almost everybody. I have always been a very vocal Pulseaudio critic but with Mandriva 2010.0 I have had to reconsider my opinion on it.

The reason why Pulseaudio has improved so much in Mandriva 2010.0 is thanks to all the hard work put in by the Mandriva developer Colin Guthr (see his blog about this here ) who has concentrated on integrating Pulseaudio well with the KDE sound layer Phonon.

Of course all his work will benefit all other distros too, but it might take a little bit longer before it shows up in Ubuntu and other distros packages.
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post #5 of 14
12/6/09 at 10:59pm
Tell me why PA is better. It's just an extra layer of bug-inducing nonsense to me. How can I benefit from using PA?
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post #6 of 14
12/7/09 at 12:19am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mythmaster View Post

Tell me why PA is better. It's just an extra layer of bug-inducing nonsense to me. How can I benefit from using PA?

I didn't say it's better, I largely agree with you that it's not of much use in most cases, but since most/all distros make use of it by default and since it's working well in Mandriva 2001.0, it's much more hassle to remove it than to keep it.

I still think that if distros would do without it it would be better and so far every time it wasn't working in past distro releases I have removed it, but removing it is not that easy and lot's of apps are configured to use it by default so a lot of reconfig work is needed to have everything working without PA.
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post #7 of 14
12/7/09 at 7:40am
I hear you, man, and I'm pretty upset with distro maintainers for forcing this on us. This is yet another reason why I still prefer to build everything from scratch in Gentoo -- I'll patch the kernel for low-latency audio and then tell everything to use JACK as I build.

Maybe if we raise enough hell we can get the distros to provide us with an option during install that will allow us to choose which sound server to use.
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post #8 of 14
12/7/09 at 10:50am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mythmaster View Post

Maybe if we raise enough hell we can get the distros to provide us with an option during install that will allow us to choose which sound server to use.

That has been tried with Mandriva, but they didn't listen:
http://ideas.mandriva.com/en/idees/show.php?id=142

But as I said at least Pulseaudio is not causing trouble anymore in Mandriva 2010.0, it just does it's (useless) job unintrusively.

I'm not sure the time and hassle of a Gentoo install is worth the advantage of having a PA free install...
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post #9 of 14
12/7/09 at 12:09pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by tux99 View Post

I'm not sure the time and hassle of a Gentoo install is worth the advantage of having a PA free install...

Haha...I wouldn't dream of recommending Gentoo to a novice user because installation involves building a kernel, etc. I love it for that plus many other reasons.

I WOULD, however, recommend using a rolling distro like Debian Testing or Arch, though, because you have access to the latest code features without waiting 6 months for a release/upgrade.

Sorry to drift OT here, OP.
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post #10 of 14
12/7/09 at 12:18pm
I use Debian Squeeze (testing), and the default is still ALSA, although you have the option of installing PulseAudio if you want (which I don't).
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post #11 of 14
12/7/09 at 12:52pm
It really is mind boggling how Rube Goldberg-esqe the audio systems are in Linux.

Why is it so difficult to come up with the software equivalent of a mixing board?
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post #12 of 14
12/7/09 at 1:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac The Knife View Post

It really is mind boggling how Rube Goldberg-esqe the audio systems are in Linux.

Why is it so difficult to come up with the software equivalent of a mixing board?

Because Computer Science types LOVE to abstract an API to the nth degree, vs making a solution work from an engineering/end user point of view.
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post #13 of 14
12/7/09 at 1:12pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac The Knife View Post

It really is mind boggling how Rube Goldberg-esqe the audio systems are in Linux.

Why is it so difficult to come up with the software equivalent of a mixing board?

I think the main problem is "too many chiefs and not enough indians". That, plus the main distros are focusing on PA which is buggy and retarded at best.

WHY? WHY? WHY?

/soap box

"build your system from sources and don't be bothered with this ********"
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post #14 of 14
12/8/09 at 5:53am
Thread Starter 
Actually, I think I determined the source of the problem. It's a bug in either the bluetooth driver or the bluetooth-pulseaudio plugin. When sharing an adapter between an a2dp headset and another bluetooth peripheral (I use an Apple wireless kb), there is "interference" between the two devices -causing the a2dp audio to skip, delay and be generally useless. Many users are seeing this (per the ubuntu forums).

One workaround I have heard of is to use two bluetooth adapters, which leads me to believe the problem is in the blutooth driver.

I think the pulseaudio is a good idea in theory but the implementation has been way too complex and buggy. And, just after battling ALSA to get my HDMI/SPDIF on NVIDIA working, I'm a bit frustrated at having to do so much background research on every upgrade.

On a related note, does anyone know of Bluetooth dongles that provide HID proxy? If I could present my Apple keyboard as just another USB keyboard, I think things would be a lot smoother.
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