Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

agapito · 2012-02-01 09:26:01

Some years ago i hated pulseaudio but now things have changed. Pulseaudio 1.1 (now in testing) works very well, in my machine at least. I let pulseaudio to take full control of my sound card installing pulseaudio-alsa, I uninstalled kmix and installed veromix plasmoid and my experience is very positive.

Veromix plasmoid

I confess I do not expect many people who wants pulseaudio by default, but I would like to discuss it.

Frequently i see posts here from people not having audio on some apps. That's because they have two or more audio devices (hdmi, usb mic) and alsa doesn't choose the correct device to play sound. Or people who cannot get sound on more than one program at once. With pulseaudio this problem dissapears and additionally you can control individually the volume of each application like Windows 7.

I've tested apps like, kdenlive, kaffeine, lmms, emulators, audacity, wine, skype, flash, amarok, qmmp, mplayer and i didn't have any problem. In virtualbox for example i run audacity on a virtuallized win XP box, and i can record easily my usb mic while i am using it in a skype call in linux. Also i can record my linux "stereo mix" simply drag and dropping the virtualbox record stream in veromix plasmoid.

Ok all is not positive, pulseaudio is a process running between audio devices and programs, so cpu usage increase a little bit, but not excessively. And adds more latency, that could be a problem for people using jack server. But for the most of the Chakra users should be OK.

What do you think?

Last edited by agapito (2012-02-01 09:52:47)

jmc · 2012-02-01 12:44:03

From my personal experience, PulseAudio has always created more issues than solutions. But, I have to say, with releases 1.0 and 1.1 things definitely got better, and I can see KDE adopting it more widely (see the new KMix rework for KDE 4.8).

I think we should maybe reconsider enabling it by default, but ofc I'd first like to hear from a lot of users and team members.

Teho · 2012-02-01 13:14:42

I think that PulseAudio is absolutely essential for every desktop or mobile centric distribution. It supports features like:
-Application specific volume
-Bluetooth headphones
-Multiple simultaneous outputs and inputs (audio from VLC to headphones, XBMC to TV and Skype to bluetooth headphones in different room, all at the same time)
-Systemwide equalizer
...that almost anyone can find use for. The problems that some people encounter with PulseAudio are almost always caused by bad drivers and even those are rarity these days thanks to PA.

I'd go for Veromix and PulseAudio by default until KMix catches up.

Last edited by Teho (2012-02-01 13:15:32)

eddi · 2012-02-01 14:13:01

I think pulseaudio should be installed, too. Especially with veromix plasmoid it is a great solution.

SteveK · 2012-02-01 14:24:46

I don't think that it should be a default application because it adds another layer of complexity. In other words it's not KISS.
Of course those that require its functionality should have every opportunity to install it themselves from the repos.

honor · 2012-02-01 14:52:02

In this sense, we should drop phonon, it's just a layer of complexity.

If it works, improves functionality, and doesn't bother packagers, I'm for it.

agapito · 2012-02-01 14:55:04

SteveK wrote:

I don't think that it should be a default application because it adds another layer of complexity. In other words it's not KISS.
Of course those that require its functionality should have every opportunity to install it themselves from the repos.

Veromix and pulseaudio is like networkmanager and his network plasmoid, makes things easier. Blacklist modules, change phonon backends and unplug usb mics for getting audio, is not KISS. The only con of pulseaudio is his CPU usage, not a problem for me, but maybe is for users with older machines. I think it should be installed by default along veromix plasmoid replacing kmix. New users will enjoy it, specially when they run chakra from live cd. If you don't like pulseaudio or is not working fine, you can uninstall it easily, removing 3 or 4 packages.

Last edited by agapito (2012-02-01 14:59:48)

serraemeira · 2012-02-01 14:58:40

agapito wrote:

Frequently i see posts here from people not having audio on some apps. That's because they have two or more audio devices (hdmi, usb mic) and alsa doesn't choose the correct device to play sound.

Yes! That's what happened here. And pulseaudio has solved this problem.

The unique problem IMO is skype. Its sound quality is not so good with pulseaudio. With alsa skype has a better sound.

Last edited by serraemeira (2012-02-01 14:59:01)

Tromzy · 2012-02-02 10:24:38

Thanks to this thread, I gave Pulseaudio a try, and it seems to work well. I have only one question : when I installed it, my audio device switched to Pulseaudio in System Settings -> Multimedia -> Phonon, which I assume is normal. But when I rebooted, it went back to "Audio interne Stéréo Analogique" and doesn't show "Pulseaudio" anymore. But the Pulseaudio daemon is running and it seemed to be in use since Veromix allows me to change the volume for each application. Is this normal ?

manutortosa · 2012-02-02 20:23:40

We had already PulseAudio and we discarded it by many issues. One important is Wine, some applications will not work at all with PulseAudio. Also there's many other problems with PulseAudio so i really think Pulse should be optional.

Teho · 2012-02-02 22:58:28

It's bit hard for me to grasp how there can be such critical flaws in PulseAudio that it can be included in every major distribution by default but not in Chakra. How important can some apps in Wine be for "Qt-only" KDE centric distribution?

To me not including PulseAudio by default sounds similar to shipping with Openbox instead of KWin by default because someone might have hardware that doesn't support compositing.

manutortosa · 2012-02-02 23:39:16

Well that's not the same at all. we decided to ship Alsa by default after asking important sound developers and testing already PulseAudio installed by default for a while.

About your "every major distribution" sentence we don't really care at all. Every major have also Gnome but Chakra no. We don't try to do the same as the rest, we try to bring the most pleasant KDE experience and all the tests we did points to Alsa by default as the best option.

In fact i did prepared myself all the packages to make PulseAudio ready for be default in Chakra and i was the one requesting to ship it once, maybe Pulse will be default someday but not because the rest are shipping it

agapito · 2012-02-02 23:51:36

Wine works fine with pulseaudio now. I am "listening" crysis 2 at this moment...

philm · 2012-02-03 00:33:40

From the Archimedes-Release-Team (Chakra 2012.02) side: ALSA will be the default sound system. We already froze all features and our first test-image is scheduled later today. Pulse-Audio can be installed later thru our repositories.

It will be added into one of our next stable releases. Pushing it now not fully tested doesn't give us anything.
Chakra should work as it is mostly out of the box. Keep it simple. Pulse is a great tool but not ready yet for prime-time.

Keep up the testing so we might find a simple solution which will work for all of us.

ojoao · 2012-02-03 19:06:32

agapito wrote:

Some years ago i hated pulseaudio but now things have changed. Pulseaudio 1.1 (now in testing) works very well, in my machine at least. I let pulseaudio to take full control of my sound card installing pulseaudio-alsa, I uninstalled kmix and installed veromix plasmoid and my experience is very positive.
http://kde-look.org/CONTENT/content-pre3/116676-3.jpeg
[...]

Hello,

how do you get the drop-down list of predefined equalizers in "Multiband EQ" ? I'm testing veromix, but at the moment I'm able to manually slide the all the sliders but I see no drop-down list to chose from

A system-wide equalizer would be great to optimize the sound out of my laptop speakers.

I'm I missing something (dependencies?). Any suggestions ? thanks

agapito · 2012-02-03 20:17:22

Have you installed swh-plugins from ccr?

Teho · 2012-02-03 21:04:34

Veromix equalizer doesn't support profiles and is therefore barely usable. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any other Qt-based systemwide PulseAudio equalizers avaible aside from it but GTK-based pulseaudio-equalizer is quite good.

It's visually undistinguishable from KDE apps with oxygen-gtk.

About your "every major distribution" sentence we don't really care at all. Every major have also Gnome but Chakra no

That wasn't my point at all and it should be blatantly obvious. As long as there's no Qt/KDE spesific PulseAudio issues (and as far as I know there is not) the fact that mainstream distributions ship with it means that it probably works well... and it does. Not to rise an argument here but you have not really spesified any issues related to PulseAudio and the Chakra bug tracker is empty which leaves me to wonder what might they be. That's not to say that there aren't any; I know that there are some issues with Jack but Chakra doesn't exacly seem to be geared for pro audio anyway and that some hardware doesn't work well with PulseAudio because of driver issues hence the analogue.

george · 2012-02-03 21:19:09

the fact that mainstream distributions ship with it means that it probably works well...

Chakra has higher standards than other "mainstream" distros. PCLinuxOS has many things in their repos, but they do not test like Chakra does. In fact, they pushed an update to one of their packages that completely broke X on my PCLOS box, which is why I ended up switching to Chakra. Neither PulseAudio nor Veromix work out of the box on my computer (I have always had audio problems with other Linux distros), and I am glad that Chakra does not ship them by default.

ojoao · 2012-02-03 21:43:09

agapito wrote:

Have you installed swh-plugins from ccr?

Ye I did. I even uninstalled kmix after, just to see if it was causing some interferences. Nothing changed.

Teho wrote:

Veromix equalizer doesn't support profiles and is therefore barely usable.

I assume you know about what you are saying. It's just the screenshot from kde-look suggested that feature was supported.

In the meantime I tweak the sliders of the equalizer by hand! The sound is glitchy for a moment as I do it, but then it becomes normal again. If anyone knows a better way to do it, maybe a config file to edit ?

Teho · 2012-02-03 22:15:12

ojoao wrote:

It's just the screenshot from kde-look suggested that feature was supported.

Veromix supports various kinds of equalizers/effects likes DJ EQ, Flanger, Multivoice Chorus and Pitch Scaler but not profiles. You can add the other effects from right-click context menu in "Effects" section (the menu on plasmoid was removed in recent release).

ojoao wrote:

The sound is glitchy for a moment as I do it, but then it becomes normal again.

This is annoying bug but only occurs sometimes for me or could have been fixed in recent PulseAudio release.

ojoao wrote:

If anyone knows a better way to do it, maybe a config file to edit ?

The easiest way is the pulseaudio-equalizer but you can also manually edit it from

/.pulse/equalizerrc

george wrote:

Chakra has higher standards than other "mainstream" distros. PCLinuxOS has many things in their repos, but they do not test like Chakra does

PCLinuxOS is not mainstream distribution, PulseAudio is the "de facto" audio server on Linux and Chakra has it in its repos.

george wrote:

Neither PulseAudio nor Veromix work out of the box on my computer (I have always had audio problems with other Linux distros), and I am glad that Chakra does not ship them by default.

That's most likely because the drivers for your audio card are bad/broken. It's unavoidable fact that Linux doesn't have perfect driver support for every piece of hardware avaible but at least I think that distribution shouldn't be held down by the idea that they should support every possible hardware combination. PulseAudio works for vast majority of users and for them it provides various important features and brings Linux on par with Mac OS X and Windows on audio.

Last edited by Teho (2012-02-04 00:49:32)

ojoao · 2012-02-04 00:28:32

Teho wrote:

The easiest way is the pulseaudio-equalizer but you can also manually edit it from
/.pulse/equalizerrc

So if If edit /.pulse/equalizerrc like one of those presets http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~psyke83/+j … r/presets/ I should get systemwide equalizer ?

PS: I didn't say anything about Chakra/standards/other "mainstream" distros, so it wasn't me you were quoting on that

Teho · 2012-02-04 01:04:41

ojoao wrote:

So if If edit /.pulse/equalizerrc like one of those presets http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~psyke83/+j … r/presets/ I should get systemwide equalizer ?

Well almost as that alone doesn't enable the equalizer.

Example of enabled equalizer file:

mbeq_1197
mbeq
Multiband EQ
1.0
Ska
1 [this is the on/off switch; 0 = off, 1 = on (this isn't part of the file ofc :p)]
0        
-30
30
15
-4.5
-8.1
-8.9
-8.5
-8.0
-6.0
0.0
1.5
2.5
2.7
3.2
3.3
5.8
6.4
6.4
50
100
156
220
311
440
622
880
1250
1750
2500
3500
5000
10000
20000

So you have to add:

...after the EQ name in the file to enable it and yes I tested it and it works.

PS. fixed.

adityaarun1 · 2012-02-04 03:17:17

pulseaudio should be definitely be added along with veromix. pulseaudio 1.0 is working extremely well on my machine.

ojoao · 2012-02-04 11:49:58

Teho wrote:

Example of enabled equalizer file:

Hum ... only modifying/creating .pulse/equalizerrc doesn't seem to work here.

This is my guess :
When using the equalizer in veromix, to get that equalizer to "work", the audio streams that are playing have to be "under" or be sent to "Multiband EQ" (when right click on an audio stream in veromix i see "move to" with 2 choices (1.) Internal audio [=my sound card] and (2.) Multiband EQ [=a virtual sound card created throught pulseaudio by veromix ?] ).

So in my opinion what is missing now is the connection between the equalizerrc and the "sound card"...

Do you think if i modify the name Multiband EQ in equilizerrc to make it correspond to my sound card it would work ? And how to know the exact name pulseaudio gives to my sound card so i put the right name in equilizerrc... just asking

Last edited by ojoao (2012-02-04 12:12:54)

ojoao · 2012-02-04 14:25:42

ok ... this is how I think it worked for me :

1. Get "pulseaudio-equalizer" script from here : http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~psyke83/+j … :/usr/bin/

and save it to $HOME dir.

2. Right click the saved "pulseaudio-equalizer" and make it executable.

3. create a "$HOME/.pulse/equalizerrc" file, like Teho said.

As an example, my equalizerrc (modified from http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~psyke83/+j … r/presets/) :

mbeq_1197
mbeq
Multiband EQ
1.0
Soft Rock
1
1
-30
30
15
2.7
2.7
2.7
1.5
1.5
1.4
0.0
-3.6
-8.0
-7.2
-9.8
-8.9
-6.6
1.4
5.8
50
100
156
220
311
440
622
880
1250
1750
2500
3500
5000
10000
20000

4. run "./pulseaudio-equalizer enable".

(I think at some point I also ran "./pulseaudio-equalizer enable-config")

5. run "./pulseaudio-equelizer log" and check for this line "PA_EQUALIZER_STATUS=1"

6. in veromix, eventually make the audio streams go/move to "Multiband EQ".

Maybe this is a way to make it work, unless it's all in my head and nothing changed

As for the topic, I don't think pulseaudio is a bad thing, and if it can do things like systemwise equalizer (I don't think alsa does it), even better.

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#1 2012-02-01 09:26:01

Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#2 2012-02-01 12:44:03

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#3 2012-02-01 13:14:42

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#4 2012-02-01 14:13:01

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#5 2012-02-01 14:24:46

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#6 2012-02-01 14:52:02

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#7 2012-02-01 14:55:04

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#8 2012-02-01 14:58:40

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#9 2012-02-02 10:24:38

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#10 2012-02-02 20:23:40

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#11 2012-02-02 22:58:28

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#12 2012-02-02 23:39:16

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#13 2012-02-02 23:51:36

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#14 2012-02-03 00:33:40

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#15 2012-02-03 19:06:32

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#16 2012-02-03 20:17:22

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#17 2012-02-03 21:04:34

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#18 2012-02-03 21:19:09

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#19 2012-02-03 21:43:09

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#20 2012-02-03 22:15:12

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#21 2012-02-04 00:28:32

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#22 2012-02-04 01:04:41

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#23 2012-02-04 03:17:17

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#24 2012-02-04 11:49:58

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

#25 2012-02-04 14:25:42

Re: Should be pulseaudio installed by default in Chakra iso?

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