[widdma]

PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need. Per app volume is an amazing feature and switching sinks is a breeze. I often play music on my stereo (mobo sound card) and game audio on some headphones (audio over hdmi through monitor). Being able to switch them around live is great.

However, like systemd, PulseAudio large and opinionated so it's not everyone's cup-of-tea.

[CaptSpify]

> PulseAudio is pretty good these days and typically works out of the box for most need.

Ehh...... I'll disagree with that. I have ~50% success rate of it working on my devices in the past 5 years.

[paulfurtado]

A 50% success rate is pretty bad. May I ask what distributions you're using and which devices you've had trouble on? Are you using any special configuration?

Most modern distros come with pulseaudio by default, which means I'd guess that over 90% of linux users use pulseaudio successfully. I've run workshops helping people install linux on their machines and I've never run into a system where pulseaudio did not work that alsa did.

[pdkl95]

> come with pulseaudio by default

Which means they almost certainly include libasound.so, because PA still depends on ALSA in the kernel. Even in the case of distros that only use the ALSA emulation interface for PA, the traditional ALSA interface is still provided. Lots of software would break without that support.

It's more accurate to say most distros support both PA and ALSA by default.

> use pulseaudio successfully

Note that "successfully" doesn't imply "enjoyably" or "preferentially". I still hear complaints regularly from people that hate newer (PA-focused) distros that introduced a lot of latency problems. Movie audio sync became inconsistent (hundreds of ms latency, very high variability), and UI audio cues playing up to 3s (3000ms) after the visual changes.

[CaptSpify]

Mostly debian and ubuntu. Mostly Thinkpads, a couple of dells that I don't remember the model of, and a couple of compaqs. All of them standard builds. I've never added a soundcard that I can recall.

This is what bothers me so much about discussions about PA. There are legitimate problems with it, and whenever someone mentions them, everyone else chimes in to say that they are the minority, that they are doing it wrong, etc etc. This is how polarization happens.

I've had a much higher success rate with alsa ootb.

[Zardoz84]

And I have a 100% success rate. A single case don't means nothing.

[CaptSpify]

No, but I can demonstrate that there are problems. And judging by others in this thread, I'm not the only one. I find that saying "typically works out of the box for most need." is incorrect.

[nirbheek]

In open source, an unreported bug doesn't exist. Did you report it upstream?

[kuschku]

Sadly, pulse is also still quite fragile and has a massive latency.

It’d be preferable if for Linux there was an audio server closer to what JACK is (although both JACK and JACK2 aren’t ideal either).

(That said, I mix hardware mixing and pulse for my purposes)

[m45t3r]

> has a massive latency.

The trade-off for latency in PA is lower power usage. I think most consume users are pretty happy that their sound system does not suck tons of energy just to offer sub-10ms of audio latency.

> JACK

AFAIK, PulseAudio and Jack 2 can work pretty seamlessly together thanks to a new dbus API (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#Pul...).

[AstralStorm]

Mostly, but you will need a tuned kernel setup to have JACK working properly as in no random underruns.

[beedogs]

I gave up long ago and simply use audio cards that do hardware mixing. There's no need for anything other than ALSA if you do it that way.

[kuschku]

Unless you want to do filters or additional in/out channels, and more than the card supports.

In my case, I use 3 audio cards, an internal one for speakers, a Behringer Xenxy Q502 for headphones and microphone, and a backend streaming to my phone (in case I wanna walk around the house listening to music via headphones).

Mixing audio into streams for recording, live stream, headphones, etc isn’t easy even with hardware cards unless you spend a LOT of money.