[NBLUG/talk] Sound problem with Skype on Ubuntu 9.04

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Thu Sep 10 09:35:13 PDT 2009


On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 09:22:40AM -0700, Jordan Erickson wrote:
> Not to rain on the PA bashing parade, but Pulse has been working
> fantastically for me and my LTSP setups (~250 thin clients, ~1400 users
> total). Just remember that it's still a new thing and was just adopted a
> couple of years ago by some major distros. In time the current bugs will
> be squashed. Don't knock it just because not every single app supports
> it 100% yet. This is open source, after all. Complaints do nothing for
> progress. Work with the devs by submitting and commenting on bug
> reports, or if you're a dev then why not try fixing some of the broken
> stuff?... Or just use another sound server. Flaming an open source
> technology is just about as productive as screaming at a flat tire.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jordan
> 

Yeah for what it's worth, while there were some issues in 8.10 with pulse,
it really improved with 9.04. Honestly many people's dissatisfaction with
pulse "not working" had to do with how poorly flash audio worked with it
for some time. But like I said, while 9.04 wasn't perfect, it was a much,
much better release than the initial 8.04 release or 8.10. 

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the issues with Skype and the
microphone have less to do with pulse and more to do with mixer settings.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org

> 
> 
> Ed Rogers wrote:
> > There does seem to be some disatisfaction among users of PulseAudio,
> > though not among its developers. I think this link fun:
> > http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-pulseaudio-problems.html
> > 
> > And so is the following quote from it:
> > 
> > alankila said...
> > 
> >     As a developer who hacked a pulseaudio client using the "simple"
> >     interface, literally no more than a few calls, I am very unimpressed.
> >     It doesn't work. The pa_simple_write() call accepts a pointer of sound
> >     data and length of that buffer to write. And guess what? Only buffer
> >     lenghts in the 2048 - 8192 range actually appear to work. (Audigy 2 ZS
> >     as hardware.) Anything else and I get skips and jumps in the playback.
> >     Absurd.
> >     Even today, writing exactly 4096 byte buffers to that piece-of-shit
> >     sound server, I sometimes hear the audio jump. On an dual-core system.
> >     This is so crappy it's not funny.
> >     I would _love_ to use the ALSA-to-Pulse bridge thingy that you can
> >     enable with a few lines in .asoundrc but that doesn't work either. Let
> >     me qualify that. Like, you might hear the audio play without your
> >     whole damn application freezing up when a simple buffer underflow
> >     happens because Linux scheduler did not see fit to give enough CPU
> >     time to your app.
> >     And when that stupid pulseaudio demon hangs, like it semireliably does
> >     when I'm seeking in audacious using the cursor keys, the whole daemon
> >     and any clients using it have to be killed and restarted. And it does
> >     this semiregularly, on laptop with intel hardware I resurrect the
> >     bloody thing every second day or so.
> >     I fucking hate pulseaudio at this point. With this kind of show so
> >     far, it is irrelevant how great it is at some random point in the
> >     future. Can't we just get software that works? Users do not want to be
> >     betatesters any longer. If open source can't produce working code
> >     without pushing shit to masses, maybe it is a failure as a development
> >     model.
> >     Pulse defenders say that ALSA's dmix might have been atrocious in so
> >     many ways, but I never noticed a thing: honestly, ALSA's dmix Just
> >     Worked. Something I can't say Pulse to do.
> >> I the last time I upgraded Ubuntu, I forceably removed PulseAudio
> >> entirely and re-installed alsa to make it work. It was not something
> >> that I would want to walk someone through over the phone.
> >>
> >> I would hit up the Skype website and see if there's a new version.
> >> Failing that, search the Skype and Ubuntu forums. When I looked
> >> earlier this year, some people had gotten it to work (though their
> >> instructions didn't work for me). With any luck, someone will have
> >> found a good workaround by now.
> >>
> >> --
> >> William Tracy
> >> Work: wtracy at cisco.com
> >> Play: afishionado at gmail.com
> >> Cell phone: (805) 704-0917
> >> Internet phone: (707) 206-6441
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> > 
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------
> > Debian: It might start with Ubuntu but before you know it you're on the
> > hard stuff.
> > 
> > 
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> 
> -- 
> Jordan Erickson
> Owner, Logical Networking Solutions
> http://www.logicalnetworking.net
> 707-636-5678
> 
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