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

[Ed Rogers]

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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