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Sweet, delicious Kool-aid.

Apparently aseigo is having problems with pulseaudio.

Just thought I’d like to say I’ve never had a big problem with pulseaudio in my day-to-day usage. And by that, I mean playing music, using skype, receiving notifications, and streaming sound over the network. Since it became available in Fedora 8’s repos, pulseaudio has given me no problems. None. And especially not in recent months, when it has become rock-solid stable. I’m not too sure what he means by the insane complexity though. To me, it is quite simple:

You’ve got some program that wants to play a sound. It connects to the pulseaudio server, sends the stream, and forgets about it. Pulseaudio does its own little bit of work, involving taking that stream and outputting it to the default driver. The design isn’t a whole lot more different than JACK’s or Phonon’s, in that you can create complicated sound graphs of inputs and outputs. The terminology, implementation, and control is a bit different but its all the same deal.

If Pulseaudio had an advantage over phonon, ALSA, jack, or any other sound API, it would be the network transparency. Just like X, you set the PULSE_SERVER variable and anything using libpulse (including the alsa plugin) sends sound to that server. It all Just Works(tm).

On a side note, installing Pulseaudio on a friend’s Ubuntu Just Worked as well. I don’t think aseigo’s specific case warrants writing off PulseAudio supporters as some horribly misled group of people.

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