(08-02-2021, 03:37 AM)venam Wrote: I recently wrote a summary

A “summary”! 😂 That’s an awesome in-depth article that could show up in a book, my guy.


I use PulseAudio and Jack. PA has features that are really hard to do with plain ALSA, for example I can easily plug in an equalizer (or any LADSPA module!), I can set volume per-application (yes, I do that), I can easily move programs between sound cards (I have at least two of them, plus maybe HDMI). It’s also awesome to have those “Monitor” devices, where you can just record what’s playing on a certain device. They also allow me to use rtspeccy as a generic visualizer for everything, which is great. I admit that I skipped the first few years of PulseAudio where it might have been very buggy – no idea. It’s solid today and I actually like it.

pulsemixer is the frontend that I use. It’s a very tidy UI. Sometimes I get the impression that people are just confused by tools like pavucontrol and then blame PA for it, but that’s pure speculation, of course.

Jack is unavoidable for some software like Guitarix (which saved me a ton of money) or Ardour. My external audio interface (a Focusrite Scarlett Solo) is blacklisted in PulseAudio, so I can run Jack and PA at the same time, where Jack only uses the Scarlett. That said, Jack (or the applications using it) has more bugs than PA. For example, LMMS gets kicked from Jack all the time, which is very annoying. Ardour sometimes screws up everything, all the routing is gone. This is a major PITA, it really feels a bit fragile. Could be a bug in Ardour or Jack, I don’t know.

I used to have a hand-written ~/.asoundrc and used plain ALSA, but come on, this is so much work …

Haven’t used PipeWire yet. PA just became a really stable and solid platform for me, so I’m a bit reluctant to change again. (I have zero use for all that Flatpak stuff and containerized apps – yet.)

My desktop environment doesn’t use sound events. Well, GTK sometimes does, but not on purpose. Some of my scripts sometimes run beep, but that’s it. Sound events feel like a relic from the Windows 95 era to me. %)