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177 Comments
- Nephersir7, on 12/21/2008, -2/+85Sorry I can't hear you
- inactive, on 12/20/2008, -2/+59There does need to be some unification here. Some DAW programs work only with jack by default. Jack is a bit of a tard to work with and it can be complicated. OSS readily supports X fi but does not gel well with Ubuntu as evident in the forums. Unification and creating one or two true fully supported audio systems would be great for nubs like me. I love Linux and after 3 years of it, Windows is never going to be my main OS again but sometimes the complexity of choice is overwhelming. Please collaborate so everyone has an equal choice.
- Gndoab, on 12/21/2008, -2/+41Audio is the reason I still use windows over linux in my current setup. I have a laptop with a SB!Live 5.1 USB sound card, and I have my tv-audio out run through the line-in on the card (using the "What U Hear" function, and EAX, I have perfect 5.1 surround for my television, xbox, and computer). With linux, There is no EAX, and It only recognizes two of the channels of sound (no subwoofer either). I spent hours one day trying various work-arounds posted in the ubuntu forums, but after all my hard work, I then had no sound at all. On my most recent install, Flash in Firefox was using the onboard sound instead of my SB!Live (which I had set to default in the sound settings), and the only way to change it was to load the driver for the onboard sound into the driver blacklist. Seriously...something this fundamental to modern media-PC setups shouldn't be THAT hard.
- dontfriendme, on 12/21/2008, -3/+39Slightly off topic, but does anyone remember the days of DOS games where you'd have to go into setup.exe and tinker with settlings like IRQ etc. for an hour before you could get sound working? I miss those days :)
- Baronvontito1, on 12/21/2008, -3/+36It REALLY is. Having to spend hours installing and configuring different kinds of sound engines to end up with buggy and unreliable sound isn't something one should have to do.
- NtrmDscrptr, on 12/21/2008, -1/+33Audio is linux is abysmal, and I'll tell you exactly why.
I spend nearly every moment of free time writing music software on linux, and I spend way too much time fighting my OS.
Let's start with Ubuntu: They've had two AWFUL releases for musicians. 8.04 included pulseaudio which they misconfigured horribly. 8.10 was even worse, because the realtime kernel they shipped was BROKEN. If your audio mustn't skip under any circumstances, you NEED an rt kernel. Period. Ubuntu Studio didn't help matters, because they ALSO shipped with the broken rt kernel.
So, right off the bat, if your users are using Ubuntu, they're *****.
SDL has audio capabilities that would only be acceptable in the mid 90's. SDL_mixer is extremely limited, and SDL_sound's mp3 decoding can STILL crash, whether you're using smpeg or it's built-in mp3 decoder. Fortunately, ffmpeg does mp3/ogg decoding right. If you want to see where SDL's audio capabilities need to go, look at the stuff wwise is doing. At least JACK provides an acceptable mixer...
Sound device support is also horrible. USB sound devices should just work: A 4-channel USB card requires an arcane 2-page asoundrc file, in order to bond its stereo outputs into a proper 4 channel output. Not user friendly in the slightest.
Lastly, is the issue of audio skipping (aka "xruns").
Here's the deal: With a carefully crafted setup, linux music software can have absurdly low latencies, with no xruns. But debugging what hardware or software is causing xruns on a remote user's machine can be maddening. The closed source NVIDIA drivers don't help at all, since they aren't written to be compliant with the needs of a realtime kernel. Search the internet, and you'll find scores of people hypothesizing over which aspects of these drivers can cause audio skippage. Throw in the uncertainties of laptop power scaling (for CPU, GPU, HDD, and more), and it's a real mess.
All that having been said, if you know what you're doing, and you have patience, it's quite possible to setup an extremely capable linux machine for running professional music software. - e2superman, on 12/21/2008, -27/+57Linux != ready for mainstream.
- dig1x, on 12/21/2008, -4/+32You miss those days? Try Linux, your nostalgia will wane.
- 4DFX, on 12/21/2008, -8/+34Strange how I had no problems with Pulseaudio. It simply works perfectly. Am I the only one?
- ileftfark, on 12/21/2008, -3/+22What the ***** was wrong with ALSA? Pulse sucks.
- sublimeparanoia, on 12/21/2008, -1/+19that holocaust guy really spammed the enter key
- ArthurSucks, on 12/20/2008, -1/+17I find that Pulse can not record with my hardware so I'm forced to remove it. With it installed I can not record videos with Cheese or audio clips with Sound Recorder. The only way I can seem to make Audacity work at all is with Jack. It's a headache.
- sporktek, on 12/21/2008, -11/+27Linux? Confusing? No way! Burried because IT JUST CAN'T BE TRUE.
- inactive, on 12/21/2008, -0/+15"at least to newbies"... Problem is that Newbies = Mainstream
The day the Linux community will start to replace "newbies" by "mainstream" in their everyday conversation is the day they will finally understand that being a newbie is normal, that you can stay a newbie all your life and that the transition from newbs to pro shouldn't have to happen in order to use a GUI'd OS.
And that "pro" and "guru" with strict view on how "their" OS should work are the problems, not the newbs. - grungegbunny, on 12/21/2008, -2/+15I reported that dumbass.
- cdawzrd, on 12/21/2008, -3/+15do you try to record stuff or do real-time stuff?
- wonderbriefs, on 12/21/2008, -0/+12Words!? Reading?! WTF am I doing?!
- chaos386, on 12/20/2008, -1/+13You can temporarily disable Pulse with pasuspender, so you don't need to uninstall it, but I agree, things need to be improved to a point where this is no longer necessary.
- grungegbunny, on 12/21/2008, -0/+12Oh yeah? I dugg down, reported, blocked, anal raped THEN spammed Digg support.
- dig1x, on 12/21/2008, -1/+12Sound isnt the only place that hardware drivers for Linux are not full featured.
I've had the same issue with ad-hoc mode with drivers for most WiFi chipsets. - Claverhouse, on 12/21/2008, -1/+12Every install of OpenSUSE time has to be spent finding out what the hell has stopped the sound this time... Everything else works straight away, with the audio it's always something different from the last. With 11.1 the trick was to start kmix, configure the channels to add 'Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack', and *then* MUTE it.
Now, a/ this is scarcely intuitive, and b/ without an internet connection I could never have found this trick ( admittedly after wading through pages of other useless advice ).
One major problem appears to be that even if disabled in BIOS, linux still recognises and offers up the onboard sound which conflicts in many ways with the inserted soundcard. Disabling the onboard sound in linux is also not easy, even in YAST. - ctrlfreak13, on 12/21/2008, -2/+13Pretty cool how the comments on the site show what browser/OS the person you submitted the comment was using. Although why on earth is someone still using Firefox 2?!
- hoogie, on 12/21/2008, -1/+11I love linux, but I get a little frustrated sometimes when sound works better when I download a windows program and run it through WINE than when I use the native linux program. (a prime example is that the Windows version of Audacity works better through WINE than the linux version does (for me)).
- KibibyteBrain, on 12/21/2008, -1/+11@EVPacket Well, as a Windows dev who likes Windows, that's not really fair. Pulse Audio is a fine audio subsystem. The problem is it was not grandfathered in like the more advanced audio features in OSX and Windows, and so it will take a while for software packages to play nice with it. Any time you make a breaking change like that there are bound to be problems, so the idea is to avoid having to make breaking changes. Unfortunately, the weakness of FOSS is is its strength, when you have a community who has lots of freedom in how they draw up architecture, you are going to have trouble coming to any sort of consensus in a reasonable amount of time, or forcing a new consensus on people.
- nave7693, on 12/21/2008, -0/+9Diversity, one of the greatest strengths of open source software (that people may freely modify anything anyone else creates), and one of the greatest weaknesses of the same (that everyone thinks his creation is the best and keeps reinventing the wheel).
- NtrmDscrptr, on 12/21/2008, -0/+9Wow, you're so right... Ugh.
- inactive, on 12/21/2008, -2/+10No you are not, my pulseaudio works great on gentoo.
- jvincent08, on 12/21/2008, -0/+8Are you seriously advocating OSS? Please tell me you forgot the /s at the end of your post...
- rowjimmy, on 12/22/2008, -0/+8what the computer illiterate want in an os != what linux has to offer.
people need to understand the philosophy behind gnu/linux before they start clamoring for a single standard, making things easier, etc. the point of gnu/linux (at least most distros) is to empower the developer, not to reverse-engineer windows 98. - gravisan, on 12/21/2008, -2/+10hmm ... I added a printer on ubuntu, guess what I didn't require a driver cd.
- Harbinger67, on 12/21/2008, -1/+9Why would you do all that to digg support? They're good people.
- dig1x, on 12/21/2008, -5/+13Disturbedsavio translated:
2013! year of Linux on the Desktop! - fuzzynyanko, on 12/21/2008, -1/+9Usually that was done with card jumpers, which would have also affected LINUX. The SET BLASTER = A220 I7 D1 T2 bit probably has a LINUX equivalent as well. However, many games knew to use the BLASTER environment variable.
- Codename, on 12/21/2008, -0/+8I'd have to admit I liked Ubuntu a lot better until they adopted PulseAudio.
- SniperGX1, on 12/21/2008, -0/+8He was probably using an old version. Printer management in Ubuntu really came of age in the most recent version.
- omegabullit, on 12/21/2008, -0/+7Seriously, you basically described the trials and tribulations of my roommate and I spending hours of the past semester trying to establish a decent open source recording setup in Ubuntu. I would love to here any suggestions, or a forum where discussion is taking place over the best distro's and setups for doing sound work.
- reyalp, on 12/21/2008, -1/+8No problems on Ubuntu, but I have hourly problems with PA on FC8
- inactive, on 12/21/2008, -4/+11It is really complicated. OpenSuSE 11 is running okay for me however. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu has it sorted out too...
In the end if you have a nice distro all should go pretty well. Things may get a little complex, but you can always ask the community as there are plenty who are educated on how it all works.
(Also for hardware support, just use onboard if possible, it seems to be working great on all of my PCs including ones that have trouble in windows aka SoundMAX) - LeviTheSmith, on 12/21/2008, -0/+7I dugg down, reported AND sent an email to Digg Support.
- loopyloopy, on 12/21/2008, -0/+6audio in Linux made me understand the value of blacklist
- MadHarvey, on 12/21/2008, -0/+6Just to clarify, because some people seem to be getting the impression that getting your sound to work in Linux is hard.
99% of everyone who installs a distribution will have working sound out of the box (after unmuting in a mixer)
A normal user doesn't need pulse. It is for advanced audio filtering, serving, etc.
There is no need for a normal user to install multiple sound engines. The alsa drivers are not buggy and will work for the vast majority of sound cards. - compacho, on 12/21/2008, -1/+7Same here. I can in no way get Audacity to work. It has to be Pulseaudio. Thanks for not making me feel alone on this.
- sirhomer, on 12/21/2008, -1/+7I want to clear some confusion because Gstreamer and Phonon are not really sound APIs. They are media APIs for playing back audio and video, often compressed and formated in different formats (MP3/Ogg/FLAC/MPEG/etc.). So these frameworks do serve a purpose that is separate that of a sound server. We have two of them, one for Gnome and one for KDE, and that's fine because they fit very well with the rest of the development environment for these DEs, and they don't really conflict with one another.
Pulse, JACK, etc on the other hand is doing stuff that could probably be done with ALSA. ALSA is firstly a driver model for sound cards, and also exposes a generic sound server API. This is all done within the kernel, so it's the lowest you can go.
Ideally I think stuff like per-process sound adjusting should be done at the ALSA level. I am not a kernel hacker, and I am not 100% sure it's possible. But I think this would be the ideal solution, to just improve ALSA and have Gstreamer and what not talk directly to ALSA. - RainStreet, on 12/21/2008, -1/+7I usually have the most luck with ALSA it seems. Sound in Linux definitely can be confusing if it doesn't work the first time around. I still have problems with my Realtek card on my desktop.
- stewacide, on 12/21/2008, -1/+6PulseAudio was a buggy mess on Ubuntu until very recently.
- T8erT0T, on 12/21/2008, -0/+5I lean towards an embarrassment. Choice is great and all but let's get the act together that works with everything.
- boltmasterzero, on 12/21/2008, -0/+5The version of Audacity that ships with Ubuntu 8.10 doesn't have a proper pulseaudio output device. However, you can find a .deb with pulse support here - https://launchpad.net/~diwic/+archive
- ElectricKetchup, on 12/21/2008, -1/+6>Did I miss any?
OpenAL - tnoy, on 12/21/2008, -0/+4When I had Vista on my laptop, I added 6 or 7 different printers around work and home to my system and none of them needed me to use a driver CD.. exactly the same experience when I switched to Ubuntu.
Also, adding a printer isn't the same thing as samba printer management. - rowjimmy, on 12/22/2008, -0/+4how many computer illiterate grandmothers do you think could do a vista install, setup, etc? i'd guess not many. for the very computer illiterate (ie, those who aren't "used" to the windows/mac ui) i think a pre-setup gui-friendly linux distro (i'm thinking of suse and ubuntu, mainly) would be a safer and easier alternative. it's only once you get to that middle range of users, who want to play games and tinker a bit, but would never dream of using a command line or having to read up on how to do something, that the linux desktop fails.
imo, distro development should ignore that sector for now. focus on building education-institution friendly desktops (for schools in the developing world, to get children access to the net, word-processing, audio-editing, image-editing, etc without proprietary handcuffs) and as always power-developer machines. -
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