PulseAudio

[Psy[H[]]

Just a question. PulseAudio is goung to be the default sound server in Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva. In some forums there is an information that because the Audacity's way of handling alsa sound device it is not possible to use Audacity and PulseAudio together.
Haven't found any PulseAudio references on this forum. Any plans for support it?

[gwado]

+10 000

[steve]

I'd rather see stable support for JACK.
ALSA is likely to be available for a good while and Audacity works well with that.

[gwado]

But i dont understand why PulseAudio runs with Amarok or a lot of others programs (on Ubuntu) and not with Audacity.
Well, i'm waiting, but i hope that will be ok in the future.

[steve]

Pulseaudio is good for media playback applications such as Amarok, Xine and MPlayer. Portaudio is the sound server that sits just above the kernel-level hardware drivers and can handle the data stream between application and driver, irrespective of what API the application uses.
There are however a couple of downsides to pulseaudio (compared with other options) when it comes to other types of audio applications such as audio editors, software synths and Digital Audio Workstations.

For Audacity, an important focus is cross-platform support, which is why Portaudio is used (multiplatform support is a central feature of Portaudio).

For many professional level audio applications, high performance and low latency are key features, which is something that JACK is specifically designed to do.

On the other side of the coin, Pulseaudio hogs the sound system, making it difficult for high performance music applications to achieve the performance levels that they require. With Amarok, you are usually only trying to read one stereo file from the hard drive and play it, but with Audacity you may need to write a stereo stream to the hard drive, while simultaneously playing another 30 tracks from the hard drive.

Fortunately, even if pulseaudio is the default sound server, it is not difficult to replace it if you need to.

[nikost4]

Hi I was wondering if any one hear could point me in the direction of the PulseAudio forum, as I can’t find it anywhere. I want to find out if it is possible to install it on vista 64. In particular I’m interested in its “Ability to change which output device an application plays sound through while the application is playing sound (without the application needing to support this, and indeed without even being aware that this happened)”. Can anyone help?

[steve]

Hi I was wondering if any one hear could point me in the direction of the PulseAudio forum, as I can’t find it anywhere.

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[XEyedBear]

Hi I was wondering if any one hear could point me in the direction of the PulseAudio forum, as I can’t find it anywhere.

Screenshot.png

What a splendid way of answering the question - couldn't be clearer or more helpful.

Well done, that boy.....

[XEyedBear]

On the other side of the coin, Pulseaudio hogs the sound system, making it difficult for high performance music applications to achieve the performance levels that they require. With Amarok, you are usually only trying to read one stereo file from the hard drive and play it, but with Audacity you may need to write a stereo stream to the hard drive, while simultaneously playing another 30 tracks from the hard drive.

Fortunately, even if pulseaudio is the default sound server, it is not difficult to replace it if you need to.

Could this be why playback of MP3 files produced by Audacity projects recorded under windows (I haven't learned yet how to compile LAME for use under OpenSuSE) sound so awful? They have all the attributes of the hardware (SB Live 24 card) running in PIO mode, rather than DMA. How do I figure out whether or not my hardware is using Pulse Audio rather then ALSA (or a bit of both)?

If I am using PulseAudio with Audacity by default, how do I change it?

[grammo]

I'd rather see stable support for JACK.
ALSA is likely to be available for a good while and Audacity works well with that.

+1