This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

And that time, of course, should be before it gets rolled out to millions of people as part of stable OS updates...

Actually that approach is exactly what I would recommend to anyone who is running what could be termed as a production system. If a particular new feature or version of software has regressions or is otherwise causing problems, report the bug and revert to the last working version.

Let those developer and tester types figure out this whole evolution of software thing.

Agreed. I posted something a lot like that on the Ubuntu Jaunty testing forum, where the idea of working around problems that people are meant to be testing seems to run rampant.

Either test the software or do everyone a favour and use a stable version. (And then stop complaining when the stable version works fine).

This would actually be decent advice if PA did try to with all the *existing* audio hardware (or at least clearly recommended a discrete PCI(e) card people could buy to get it work).

When PA's own wiki states you're an evil user for buying hardware from [long list of manufacturers] and it's your own damn fault things break in PA when they worked perfectly in Alsa, what do you expect the user reaction will be?

You don't have much other choice if you complain that PA's resampling uses a huge amount of CPU time (much more than Alsa's, which definitely does not sound so bad as said in some FUD), and the developers say that they know they should implement some SSE optimizations, but more than a year later, still nothing is done to improve it. Quite on the contrary, PA's glitch-free is actually causing extra trouble which did not exist one year ago.

“Doctor, Doctor, my toe hurts.”

(Doctor amputates malignant tumor that grew on patient's toe and patient went home happy and healty.)

You assume that PA is something so cool that it is worth period of suffering before it gets perfect. And that's where you are wrong:

1) PA promises stuff like seamless mixing several streams, glitch-free audio and switching to other devices.

Well, alsa supports mixing OOTB for several years now and contrary to PA it actually works.

Glitch-free audio? Please, the only time I get audio glitches is when PA sneaks in with some upgrade and starts messing with my sound again.

Device switching may be useful for some 0.5% of users but when PA can't even handle one device it is moot point anyway.

2) 'PA will mature in time'. Will it now? Current 0.9 line started in first half of 2006. And it still sucks. If something can't be fixed in 3 years then it should be dropped as it is obviously lost case. Even KDE needed just 1 year to go from shitty 4.0 to rocking 4.2 :-)

3) ~1 year ago Linux audio was finally at the point where you could expect it to work OOTB. DMIX was standard, almost all FOSS apps supported it and even commercial vendors like Skype or Adobe jumped on the bandwagon. Then came pulseaudio. Installed by default regardless if your hardware can handle it or not (funny, on PA's site hw found in half or more laptops is listed as unsupported), taking over your soundcard and making itself default alsa device (may be distro specific, I checked it on F10) to make sure that each app will get screwed up.

3a) If you look at Skype forum you will see lots of people asking Skype to make it work with PA. Why should they? Audio standard on linux is ALSA, not yet another cool-sound-server-of-the-week. PA should either provide *WORKING* alsa emulation or behave like good client (this means working with dmix). It does neither. Of course i you try to suggest that PA is buggy Lennart always claims that the problem is hardware or the app. Well, if app works with alsa but not with PA's emulation of alsa then obviously emulation sucks!

4) So yes, I will continue to remove PA at first sign of audio problems and I will continue give the same advice to others. If you want to suffer through half working audio will telling yourself that it just needs 2 more years, please do so. Just don't sign up all Linux users as Lennart's free guinea pigs.

5) I get it that GNOME needed something to replace ESD. But do you need to screw all non-GNOME apps too in the process? I think this is the problem or arrogance - you (Lennart + other GNOME devs defending his brainfart) got this idea that from now on *you* make the standards and user's only choice is to bend over and take it no matter how it hurts.

Adam, that's the most impressive troll I've seen all week. Congratulations; you should be proud.

Eh eh, let's get get back to PulseAudio bashing, this is certainly the best way to stop the resurging DVCS flaming posts...

@Adam

I am currently suffering a head/desk interface problem from reading your post.

@Philip Withnall, Frederic Peters and mattj:

But except for the conspiracy theories, he is right! And you know it.

Right,

PA not working with lots of embedded sound chips? Troll!!! (even when PA wiki says so)

Skype and other apps using ALSA emulation broken? Conspiracy theory!!!

And best of all Stuart's solution for all (non-existing in his world of course) problems - don't tell anybody that they can avoid it.

I wonder how long you need to be a developer to develop this level of contempt towards users.

When PulseAudio doesn’t work on the user’s hardware (as happens for about half the sound hardware out there), removing it is the BEST ADVICE you can give the user.

Even though PA is not at fault.

We all know the benefits of PA, the cool design, and so on. But if the sound driver makes it break loose, the solution is to disable it. Full stop. Of course, the real, long-term solution is to fix the sound drivers, but since this hasn’t happened for 2 years, I’m not too excited on getting this to work tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ll have to do without PulseAudio. But with working sound.

This is the exact reason why you won’t find PA by default on Debian installs. We’re really eager to make it the default, but we won’t until it is actually possible.

You didn't even try to give a reasoning why people should not uninstall PA nor recommend that. I wonder what the point of your post is or why anyone would be influenced by it. The PA advocates will not make the numerous problems go away by repeating mantras such as this one.

Problem is that for many of us uninstallation of PA is the only way to have working sound...I am not novice but when I see 30 pages long forum discussions on how to get PA working I simply prefer to issue apt-get purge pulseaudio and have the sound working right now then waste an evening without guarantee that I will fix it.

I have three computers at home (two laptops and a desktop) and on all of them I have numerous problems with PA.

Adam a troll? Come on, he just stated reasonable things. I don't want to go bitching on PA developers but that damn thing is everywhere! To cover some really minor use cases it ruined the experience of thousands of users.....at the moment I'm sure I don't need it so why would I have to use it?! I'm pretty sure a lot of people out there don't need it either...

and to add something...why PA is so omnipresent? Why the devs decided and most importantly obtained that PA should have been installed on all of the major distributions? I think this has something to do with the power of gnome to impose so called standards to everyone. I think is not that fair...

Forcing Pulseaudio down the throat on (nontechnical) users is going to be the biggest mistake in its history. It might be the project won't survive such an initial backslash..

WRT pulse audio, I tend to have issues during upgrades, but otherwise it works flawlessly. During upgrades, I occassionally lose all sound and have to resort to a google search and once logs are analyzed, issue voodoo commands to resolve the problem.

I suspect that most PA issues are configuration issues not hardware issues. They can be fixed if the distro configured or upgraded properly or if the user is diligent enough to figure out how to solve the problem.

While I agree that uninstalling PA is not the answer (it can make things worse, especially if the distro has gone whole hog on PA), more helpful PA configuration and diagnostic tools would reduce a great number of the complaints.

I see. Pretty much every cutting edge distribution these days wants to put out a distribution that pretty much 'just works.'

'Just works.' means pretty much by definition that 'IT WORKS!' not well everything works except sound seems to be unreliable on my laptop.

I may have a preference for one distribution over most others, but I'm not personally interested in writing the fixes to the installer, or diagnostics tools needed to get PA or X, or OOo or any other application in the production distribution. If it's broken in the Alpha or Beta releases, and I have time to test and report on that, I'll be happy to help out. If the response is 'don't use that hardware', or 'that's not our problem' you've just told me you don't want it to work. If you don't want it to work, then I'll be happy to jump onto the bandwagon that tells people that you don't care if they have a good experience or not, and oh by the way you can uninstall the flaky tools.

The fix is to cleanly document what does and does not work, and if it does work what the steps to resolve a problem is. Note that I said 'cleanly.' That means not just a wiki that gets updated regularly, but that is the first hit for people looking for solutions. If they end up on some linuxhelp thread server that requires a login to see what some failed responses are, or worse on a blog that simply complains about people complaining about pulse audio not working and offering the suggestion to just use 'stable', it's not a clean documentation.

"I ran into one small audio problem and half the responses to other people mentioning it were “you need to completely remove PulseAudio”. Stop recommending that to people."

What was the problem and how did you resolve it?

Interesting, I've not seen that package before. Looks like it only exists in 8.10 and Jaunty (9.04 to-be), whereas pulseaudio has been in Ubuntu since 7.10 and was also in 8.04 of course.

Supporting people in IRC and on the mailing list there's been a fair amount of bitching that where sound has (for the most part) "Just Worked" in Ubuntu, for many _many_ people it broke when PA arrived.

I get it that we shouldn't be recommending people remove PA, but really, there's never (in the limited life so far) of Ubuntu that's caused as much pain and grief for users. Yes, other apps have been broken in the past, but you can usually install a replacement in the meantime.

With PA you're somewhat screwed if audio doesn't work, especially in the early days of Feisty and Gutsy. It's audio, that's going to affect many of the primary use cases for a computer. If it's broken, your primary goals of using the computer are difficult to realise.

Nuking PA from orbit seemed the only way for quite some time, and until PA "Just Works" you're going to carry on seeing people recommend it's removal.

Also, everyone can now look forward to PA in Jaunty auto-respawning itself even if you kill it with fire, or /etc/init.d/pulseaudio stop it, which smacks of "You _will_ use PA, whether it's broken or not, whether you want to or not". Only way to fix that? Remove it or switch distro?

Meh, some badly worded bits there "there’s never (in the limited life so far) of Ubuntu been a package "

skype

I think a bunch of people are looking at the old days with some rosy colored glasses, Linux audio was plenty broken in the past so I don't understand the "don't fix what's broken" attitude people have with pulse. *shrug*

I used to be one of the head devs of GNOME multimedia, and I'm completely with Adam as for what he writes above. My proposal: get rid of PA until it works. I honestly don't think it solves any relevant problem whatsoever anyway, I've always wondered why the project was started while the common thought a few years ago was that soundservers were dead. And now that a young, naive mind is spurring our heads with PR nonsense, it's the coolest thing in the world? Come on. But regardless of whether PA is useful or not, it should work when deployed. Right now it doesn't. So get rid of it. Your desktop will work fine without.

You say this is a wrong solution, but do not suggest a right one. Test more? There are already way too much complaints. Send patches for a core subsystem? Very little people are able to do that.

You call "sound not working in flash movies" a small problem, but for most of home users it makes the computer worthless!

I agree with all of the PA bashing here. My SB live emu10k1 card already mixes audio from multiple streams together. The only thing that changes by having PA installed by some stupid package manager dep is that my system becomes prone to applications freezing, audio popping and skipping, and my subwoofer stops working.

Pulse Audio is an evil beast, and it should die a horrible death. The sooner the better.

Seems like every post about pulse on Planet GNOME gets the same reaction - users asking to not be used as testers for pre-alpha software. Unfortunately it does not seem to change anything. If there is any response then it is yet another developer talking down to unwashed masses how it is for their own good.

Stuart L, thanks for this post. And really, I feel your pain - audio on distro X should "just work", and I've been dealing with these problems in Ubuntu since 4.10. I agree that "remove PulseAudio" is not the resolution even if it is a workaround.

Alan P, I appreciate your efforts in UF (where I don't tread due to lack of resources). I explicitly enabled autospawn in jaunty (well, thanks to a thinko I actually *didn't* enable it in 0.9.14-0ubuntu6, but it will be in ubuntu7) *to help ferret out the bugs and to resolve them*. Be aware that ubuntu7 will break audio horribly in many situations for non-native Pulse applications. I have a growing list of these use (heh, may as well be test) cases. Luke is offering 0.9.15-test2 (and newer) in his PPA. Please reproduce *all* screwed up "my sound broke on login/resume/clicking play/etc." on both jaunty's 0.9.14 and Luke's 0.9.15.

Seriously, everyone has the right to want stuff to "just work". How many people are willing to dig in and fix things so that that is the case?

> Seems like every post about pulse on Planet GNOME gets the same reaction - users asking to not be used as testers for pre-alpha software. Unfortunately it does not seem to change anything. If there is any response then it is yet another developer talking down to unwashed masses how it is for their own good.

That would make sense except for the fact that Linux Audio never worked in the first place.

It's not like people are taking a perfectly good and working system and is trying to add on some extra feature that causes massive amounts of breakage.

What we have, every single time this is brought up on Gnome planet, is the same group of people bitching and moaning about it.

They, apparently, had a carefully setup and working system that worked for their specific uses and purposes and didn't give a crap that it never worked out that well for the vast majority of other people.

So PA comes along and is trying to solve the numerous, obvious, and blaring issues with Linux audio and while it is trying to fix it it is also introducing some regressions.

For example:

Adobe flash works perfectly well with Pulse Audio now. But it's still a arguing point for some bizzare reason.

------------------------------

Let me make this painfully clear:

Pulse Audio is trying to fix a broken system. It didn't break Linux audio, Linux audio was broken by design from the beginning.

Breakages caused by PA isn't caused by design, it's caused by bugs which are fixable... unlike what was previously possible.

[...] Stuart: [...]

> It’s not like people are taking a perfectly good and working

> system and is trying to add on some extra feature that causes

> massive amounts of breakage.

For a lot of people it's exactly that. Please believe me when I tell you that I do like PA. Really, I do! But for as long as it causes more problems then it solves, it shouldn't be default and it must not be mandatory. Is that so hard to understand?

I am using Linux for 6 years and before PA I never had any problems with sound. Even KDE's beloved artsd worked for me.

Removing PA was the solution to all of my sound woes on FC10... I cannot believe such a poorly tested application was allowed to ship in a production release of an OS. ALSA/DMIX worked perfectly on the same hardware. PA was a major step backwards.

And, I am one of those who rarely has Linux sound problems (probably due to the fact that my hardware is antique and quite well supported)

You need to completely uninstall PulseAudio.

By design, pulseaudio is a flawed solution. On my setup, using pulseaudio I lose :

- hardware mixing (think higher CPU usage)

- HDA "surround" sound (to have 4 speakers)

- latency explodes to the 100s of ms

- an additional daemon that wasn't required otherwise

None of those is fixable. These are fundamental design issues.

I *do* use pulseaudio, by my choice. (On a Gentoo system, everything is my choice.)

I've been using for some time, and I *was* happy with it.. before 0.9.10. Even 0.9.10 is tolerable. But after that, it became unusable for me.

My use cases: I have two soundcards in my desktop and one in my notebook. On the desktop, one soundcard is set up for the speakers, and the other for headphones. Being able to easily switch between them is nice. As for the notebook, I make it output its sound to the desktop most of the time.

I used to run a system-wide daemon, since there was no need to login on the desktop if I did not actually want to work there. After pulseaudio no longer started after an update, I learned that Lennart really hates it if people want to do this, but as he is a gracious fellow, he'll allow us to continue to do so at the cost of some configuration changes. I could live with that, though it cost me some time.

After another update to pulseaudio (0.9.11), sound became useless. Stutters, crashes, you name it. I spent hours trying to find a right configuration. Some seemed to work, for a while, only to further the disappointment when the stuttering finally became unbearable. I followed every detail in the 'Perfect Setup' page of his wiki, and still no. I made the daemon launch per-user, as God intended, and that appeared to work better.. for a while.

So I went back to 0.9.10, and stayed there ever since. I've tried every version released after that, and even sacrificed another afternoon to get 0.9.14 to work. The kicker? I learn from a BLOG, not linked to from anywhere on the pulsewiki but a BLOG, that there is a page there with known 'broken' chipsets on 'glitch-free' pulseaudio, and that passing tsched=0 at the right place will make things work again.

Three out of my three chipsets are on that list. These work flawlessly, as in, no crashes, no stutters, on ALSA, with dmix and NO configuration, and have done so ever since I switched to Linux in 2004.

The kicker? tsched=0 makes sound work okay on two out of those three chipsets. But the one broken even with it is the one that drives the headphones, and that right there kills half of the usefulness of PA.

So where am I now? Sometimes, firefox crashes after closing tab with flash (latest) video in it. This does not happen with pure ALSA. Amarok sometimes stutters when compiling. This does not happen with pure ALSA. This is with 0.9.10. (Also, setting the advised rtprio and nice in limits.conf does not eliminate it.)

The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that yes, PA (>0.9.10) *does* break audio, regardless of you believing us to be trolls numbering in the single digits.

(Also, I have Hardy installed beside my trusty Gentoo. I resorted to eliminating PA from it because I use that install for two things: 1. gaming (nwn) 2. while skyping. Believe me, I *tried* to make it work. It does not.)

@Anonymous

"Carefully setup system" ? WTF? I install a distro, remove pulseaudio and stuff works. No further configuration required.

And my "specific uses and purposes" are quite standard - I want quake, skype, amarok,flash and system sounds. Sometimes at the same time.

"That would make sense except for the fact that Linux Audio never worked in the first place." - really? It started working after everybody finally switched to ALSA and after dmix got enabled by default. Why every PA supporter apparently is able to only throw around broad generalization without shred of proof?

"So PA comes along and is trying to solve the numerous, obvious, and blaring issues with Linux audio and while it is trying to fix it it is also introducing some regressions." - by screwing it even worse. Notice that PA actually does not replace *ANY* supposedly broken audio subsystems - ALSA is still here, along with xine, gstreamer, phonon and other higher level libs. PA just adds yet another middleman.

Tell me someone what exactly is broken about apps and libraries directly using alsa?

"Breakages caused by PA isn’t caused by design, it’s caused by bugs which are fixable… unlike what was previously possible." - yet another unfounded assumpmtion. Why exactly that "brokennes" (whatever it is) cannot be fixed in alsa? And PA somehow cannot get fixed for last 3 years.

The problem (from my experience) is that PA is not ready for production -- I had lots of headaches when it became standard in Ubuntu, and World of Warcraft became almost unplayable. When I uninstalled it, things (Skype, WoW) started working fine again, but guess what, I didn't lose any functionality that I wasn't using. I think that Ubuntu doesn't even ship with the specific apps to control PA (like per application volume). What's the point then in having PA installed?

Uninstalling PulseAudio is going a step too far, but disabling it isn't:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/fix-for-all-pulseaudio-related-issues.html

To those claiming that Linux audio was already broken - no, it wasn't. It might not have been perfect, but for many years now, it *has* worked adequately for most of it's users. People are objecting to PulseAudio because for some, it really is a regression to bad old days they thought were long gone.

'This has been a party political broadcast on behalf of the “there’s a time in the evolution of everything that works when it didn’t work” party.'

As an end-user I appreciate that all things take time, and I understand that writing a new sound server from the ground up is hardly the simplest of tasks... but really, I feel a need to ask "why in Christ's name was this unfinished piece of work pushed out to end-users long before it was ready?"

I like the idea of sound working on Linux. But that's the problem: in order for the solution to make me happy, it has to work first. So when PulseAudio shipped with Ubuntu and broke sound... I was not happy. I am *now* because the damn thing works, sort of like it did before the shift to PA and it's starting to become a little better integrated into the distributions, but there was a good period of time where I and my family were simply SOL as far as audio went because somebody decided that PulseAudio was the bright and glorious future of Linux audio and it got pushed out into a production distribution.

Now, I can understand the impetus to want to get new technologies into your product as soon as possible so you can work out the kinks and whatnot. But as a user I keep finding myself coming back to foundational questions about Linux release cycles. What's "production" supposed to mean when, during any given release, most any part of the system is liable to be crashy, buggy, or outright broken, because a developer somewhere up the line decided that Foo is broken, outdated, and no longer meets the users' needs (but did happen to work), codes up replacement Bar, and pushes Bar to major distributions before it's anywhere near to being ready for general use so he can have end-users as testers or something?

As always, no response from the PA-Pushers. I kind of expected that.

If it works, the answer is - by definition - not wrong. It's just not the answer you'd like to read.

My old laptop had an issue where the sound would break after a suspend-resume cycle unless the module was reloaded. Of course this would only work if there were no applications (e.g. pulseaudio) attached to the soundcard. Since mixing, etc, worked properly with alsa, as it has for years, my solution was "sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/pulseaudio", so that I don't have to kill it every time I reload the module (apparently it's too hard to fix the kernel module). Curiously, on my new laptop ALSA appears to be broken -- my right or left channel appear as separate sound cards (note that I didn't test this thouroughly, and I may be misremembering). Only pulseaudio seems to works properly.

However, this completely ignores the fact that an audio daemon *should* be unnecessary, like it was for me in the entire duration between "alsa became standard, gnome no longer needs esd" and "alsa still works fine, but gnome insists on pulseaudio anyway".

If your problem is "my sound doesn't work quite right", The solution is not "Let's write an audio daemon to work around quirks in the alsa driver and force everybody to use it even if alsa works fine for them". The solution is to *fix* the alsa driver.

I can just agree with nandhp and many others. I was happy for years now that with ALSA we finally got rid of a sound server which just seems useless to me.

And now we want to reintroduce a sound server where nearly sound cards have either hardware mixing or working flawlessly with DMIX?

@sil

That comparison is silly. Cutting of your leg leaves you crippled. Removing PA leaves you with some super-unimportant features missing, but working audio that uses much less resources and works with almost every application (even dosemu).

sil: I think that for a lot of users, the benefits of PA (over Alsa/dmix) are not big enough to count removing it as a loss if its causing the problem.

After a lot of frustration, PA is now (mostly) working on my gentoo box... but since the jack-source/sink are not stable for me (ticket #472), I have to kill PA when using JACK which freezes all application which are using PA when i start JACK.

As I stated before, I do like PA. I test it every week or so, fresh from svn. I do report bugs. But as long as it doesn't work for all people that ALSA used to work for, it shouldn't be forced into distributions. You can't just say "oh, it's the driver's fault, your bad" or "oh, it's your evil closed source application's fault, don't use it", especially when - as said before - everything was working fine with ALSA.

@Matt:

A better analogy would be this:

I was walking just fine with my walking shoes and now someone tells me this super-power sound server sneaker is really cool and will let me run faster than a car. But when I wear it, my foot hurts like mad and sometimes I cannot even walk.

So I choose to remove this supposed super sound server sneaker (PA) and use my earlier walking shoes (ALSA) so I can walk easy and run a bit if I want to without hurting myself. :)