On 12/28/2012 05:44, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
pulse audio never worked for me on various debian gnu/linux setups. these days i only ever use alsa and jack, and i believe that one of these
(preferably the latter) should be the default for a pro-grade audio software.
[...]
Yes, jack is great, and we should make it easy to use. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and others all come with pulseaudio installed and setup by default. That covers probably 75% or more of GNU/Linux users. Pd should have working audio without the users having to do anything at all. So it looks like the only way to achieve that is pulseaudio support. And no, I don't consider Pd's ALSA/OSS connecting to pulseaudio and blocking all other sound a working situation.
note that i do not argue against "pulseaudio" support in Pd. i believe that the more audio backends we support the merrier. hence my suggestion to factor out the audio-backend stuff (not in this thread): this way "we" can add arbitrary without having to touch the pd-core.
I'd like to get a timestamp from IOhannes for his comment on PulseAudio not working on any GNU/Linux systems. When I look at the PulseAudio docs I like what I see,
the timestamp is 2 weeks before christmas 2012. but let me first clarify two things:
#1 i never said "any GNU/linux system". i said "various Debian gnu/linux systems" with the additional restriction that it didn't work "for me". i'm mainly using debian testing/unstable (rolling) as my distribution. also i'm not using GNOME or KDE, but xfce4 (and sometimes
#2 (and this is more important): i really confused PulseAudio for PortAudio. i often do these, since both are often abbreviated "PA".
so my rant was not targeted at PulseAudio but at PortAudio, which (and i'll happily repeat this) has not happened to work correctly yet.
In other words if there are _still_ substantial problems with getting PA to behave, maybe we could do an Ardour-style "it just works" default to the jack server that doesn't require the user to have to know they are even using jack. After all, isn't jack cross-platform (and PulseAudio not)?
i did the last implementation of jack-support for Pd (0.43) with something like this in mind. i didn't succeed very well (as we can see in this thread)...
anyhow, i agree (if this is what you are saying) that jack would be the best choice for the main backend.
fgdmsr IOhannes