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Brian Reiter

@marcan people who live in the house of Pulse Audio should not throw stones.

1 Oct 2023 at 17:58 | Wall-to-wall | Open on hachyderm.io
5 comments
Hector Martin

@breiter PipeWire only here, sorry. We're not even going to support PulseAudio on these machines if you want the DSP to work.

1 Oct 2023 at 17:58 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
argv minus one

@marcan What's the issue with PA? Just that it's obsolete and not worth supporting, or…?

2 Oct 2023 at 2:06 | Open on mstdn.party
Hector Martin

@argv_minus_one Yeah pretty much. This DSP needs to be implemented somewhere and PipeWire ended up being the best option. And it does supersede most other frameworks/use cases (PA, JACK, etc.) so there's very little reason not to use it.

Though we switched our users over earlier last year anyway, because PA was broken with headphone jack hotplug and PW worked fine, and it wasn't worth spending time debugging that when we already planned to require PW for the upcoming speaker support.

The speaker safety stuff, though, will be a stand-alone daemon working together with the kernel driver. So if you really want to use PA or anything else, it'll sound (very) bad, but you won't blow up your speakers. If the safety daemon dies or is not present, the kernel will fall back to a very low but safe volume cap.

@argv_minus_one Yeah pretty much. This DSP needs to be implemented somewhere and PipeWire ended up being the best option. And it does supersede most other frameworks/use cases (PA, JACK, etc.) so there's very little reason not to use it.

Though we switched our users over earlier last year anyway, because PA was broken with headphone jack hotplug and PW worked fine, and it wasn't worth spending time debugging that when we already planned to require PW for the upcoming speaker support.

2 Oct 2023 at 2:39 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
argv minus one

@marcan Wait, so, I was under the impression that PA and PW both use the ALSA kernel-user interface, and therefore should both work equally. I take it that's not the case? What if an app wants to use ALSA directly—is that also not going to work?

2 Oct 2023 at 2:49 | Open on mstdn.party
argv minus one

@breiter Why not? PulseAudio is not especially buggy. It did get unfairly blamed in the early years, but a lot of its alleged bugs back then were actually bugs in ALSA driver code that was, until PA, little used and little tested.

2 Oct 2023 at 2:05 | Open on mstdn.party
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