[klodolph]

I have a love-hate relationship with PulseAudio, and it seems others do too.

It makes sense to have some user-space audio layer. Software mixing, sample rate conversion, and a few other things just make sense in user space, and we can expose only bona fide hardware capabilities through the device interface. Of course, most desktop audio chipsets have hardware mixing, which means that most people think that you can just use OSS (or ALSA on Linux), and it will work. It just doesn't work on everybody's hardware.

In short, there's a hardware jungle out there and software layers like PulseAudio smooth over the differences. It's a shame that it doesn't always work well, and most people think PulseAudio is the source of the problem because most people have hardware mixers.

By comparison, if you just use OSS (or ALSA on Linux) on my computer you might see that incredibly basic features like volume control or the ability to play audio from multple apps don't even work without PulseAudio.