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

Jordan Erickson jerickson at logicalnetworking.net
Thu Sep 10 09:22:40 PDT 2009


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



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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>> talk at nblug.org
>> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------
> 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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