What is Digg?60 Comments
- Noctem, on 11/01/2007, -1/+18Sweet, per-application volume control is awesome. I can't live without it after using it in Vista.
- trogdoor, on 11/01/2007, -3/+14No.
- t3soro, on 10/31/2007, -1/+12Did anyone else notice the title of the video that Totem is playing in the screenshot? http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPo ...
- ToadLeg, on 10/31/2007, -2/+10the new comment system turned your .png into a .pnG ?
- SteveMax, on 11/01/2007, -0/+7No. Creative needs to develop an ALSA driver; this doesn't change. PA is a layer that sits "above" ALSA, OSS, or any other *nix hardware sound system; it provides a bunch of hooks for applications, who don't need to know whether the "real" driver is ALSA, OSS, CoreAudio, etc; and the sound driver doesn't need to know what is using it (esd, arts, PA, xmms using it directly, etc.).
- jdhore1, on 11/01/2007, -2/+8Pulseaudio is not something you can really screenshot...Sure there are a bunch of apps for it (like alsamixer, alsactl, alsaconf, etc for ALSA), but it's more in what the backend can do. However, I must say, I tried to install PulseAudio on my Debian system currently using ALSA and ESD and as hard as i tried i couldn't get it to work :(
- schestowitz, on 11/01/2007, -2/+8Excellent. Finally a screenshot (there was an article about it in Ars Technica about it a couple of weeks ago, but just text http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/10/ ... )
- t3soro, on 10/31/2007, -0/+6no, but it did prevent me from editing it!
- xike, on 11/01/2007, -3/+8https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio
- arjie, on 10/31/2007, -1/+6It's music dude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzicato_Five
- anshuman, on 11/01/2007, -0/+5F8 is going to be nice one.
- VinceNoir, on 11/02/2007, -0/+4Do not comment on things you obviously have no knowledge of, or interest in. It simply serves to make you look like a dickhole. A history lesson for the jackass:
On Freshmeat, the Pulseaudio project was added on July 17th 2004 (It was called Polyp Audio then): http://freshmeat.net/projects/pulseaudio/
On WIkipedia, Windows VIsta is stated to have been released January 30th, 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_vista
Even taking into account the fact that Microsoft might have been working on the multiple application volume levels (unlikely since they've always had their heads up their asse where media applications are concerned other than "business audio" which is a ***** joke) as far back as 2005, when VIsta was officially announced. That isn't really a fair comparison. Pulse can do things that Windows Vista users can only dream of. Get back to me when you can have one audio application playing sound on all of you computers in the house over the network. Wake me up when Windows Vista can let you have your desktop with all apps including audio apps follow you from one machine to another without missing a beat. Then, and only then will you illustrate that you might have a clue about what you're talking about. Until that time, I suggest you cut off your dick and shove it in you mouth so you won't sound like the ***** you are. I'm just sayin... - INCO, on 10/31/2007, -0/+3There is per app volume in Mac OSX too. Apple does not provide a way of controlling it by default
Here you go. http://www.rogueamoeba.com/detour/legacy/faq.php
That will do it for you.
I have wanted this since I used beos.
It's great to be able to mute the browser with iTunes running without fear of some flash ad making noises. - GMorgan, on 11/01/2007, -0/+3PulseAudio runs on Alsa thought it is intended to be able to emulate Alsa transparently in time.
- ToadLeg, on 11/01/2007, -2/+5A screenshot is nice to illustrate what the backend does. From the screenshot on the Fedora wiki, you can see how it individually controls sound per application, how it lists "input" and "output" items, and that you can change parameters on the fly by right clicking. Without having to read anything.
- trogdoor, on 10/31/2007, -2/+5I always thought that it was a shame that with the great network transparency of the X windowing system there wasn't an elegant network transparent sound server ( ESD just doesn't cut it ). I wonder how hard it would for applications that are having thier GUI forewareded via X forewarding automatically also foreward their audio ( which is the intuitive, and in most cases probably the desired thing for them to do ). Could it be done by the application itself by looking at the $DISPLAY environment variable, or could it also be done somehow by gnome or some other system outside the applictions? Is there an easy way to find out what display a given process is being forewarded too from outside that process?
- Speed, on 11/01/2007, -2/+5XPSP2: No
OSX: Dunno. - VinceNoir, on 11/02/2007, -0/+3No. But I'll give you more info than trogdoor did. ALSA is a set of drivers, libraries and some example userspace applications that only people like me really use. The drivers portion of ALSA is not going away. Pulse audio is a sound server but knows nothing about the audio device on the system as it does not work at the kernel level and does not provide drivers. It NEEDS ALSA in order to talk to the audio cards.
What ALSA does is provide a set of drivers for various sound devices from various manufacturers. Those drivers then abstract that sound card so that no matter which make/model the sound card is, it looks the same to applications. Pulse Audio is one of those applications. What it does is connect to the sound device and then set up a way for Pulse Audio clients to use the sound device. However, what the Pulse Audio people have done is awesome. They have their own native transport, which is fine, but if there are not apps written to use it, it would be about as useful as the NAS and MAS sound servers currently are (not too many apps, therefore not too useful). Pulse Audio wisely chose to include ESD emulation as well as OSS and ALSA emulation and a few others.
What this means is that things like the following now become possible:
1. More than one ALSA application can utilize the sound device at the same time since their streams are mixed in software before being routed to the sound device
2. ESD apps now have a "drop in" replacement with better response and lower latency as well as far more flexibility
3. You can now run a game that needs OSS or ALSA remotely (wasn't possible with plain old ALSA or OSS and only some limited support with ESD) and have it's sound routed anywhere you want on your network
So, no it's not an alternative to ALSA. It needs ALSA to be able to work at all. But it's another frontend for ALSA, which in itself rocks the world. :) - mooninite, on 11/02/2007, -4/+7Why don't you visit the history of PulseAudio? It wasn't always named "PulseAudio." This project also started before Vista was even available. Linux is *NOT* playing catch-up.
- VinceNoir, on 11/01/2007, -0/+3Actually, this is possible with ALSA, but you have to be a real gear head to make it happen.
- Noctem, on 11/01/2007, -0/+3No, it doesn't. Not until PulseAudio becomes the standard, or other audio stacks are updated with these features.
In Vista, I can set my Firefox audio level to Zero (Or ANY application that doesn't have volume control built in), and no audio will ever come out of Firefox. So I can enjoy my music in the background knowing that not a single website loaded in FF will interrupt that audio, forcing me to fumble around and find volume controls on the website itself (a flash video, wmp plugin, etc).
As far as I know, this functionality doesn't exist in any shipping Linux distribution or OS X. - geminitojanus, on 10/31/2007, -1/+4Think about it like a car stereo. Your car (the kernel) provides all the necessary elements to hook in (a big bundle of wires), and all PulseAudio does is sit a nice mixer/amplifier/etc right on top of that, which then lets other applications plug into it. PA is probably our best shot at providing a forward looking unified sound system for *nix, as it provides compatibility layers for many other sound servers, is already network transparent, and can do per-application volume control and dynamic mixing ("Aggregation" ala OS X).
PA can only do its job /after/ you've got a working ALSA or OSS driver, though. - VinceNoir, on 11/01/2007, -0/+2Dugg you up. Too bad most DIgg readers seem to have an aversion to being given a dose of truth. Reality is too hard for them to accept:
WIndows has ALWAYS been playing catch up with *nix. They take a technology that has been around for five to ten years and just re-brand it so it sounds like it's something different than what it's based on. The thing is, it actually IS new to all those poor saps stuck with Windows, they don't know any better. But in reality we've been doing it for years. - Duglum, on 11/01/2007, -0/+2Lennart Poettering posted a nice screencast yesterday to show off what PulseAudio can do at the moment: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pa-097.html
I guess that will be another step on the way to world domination for Linux. - lufthanza, on 11/01/2007, -1/+3too bad this has been available since november 2004 and earlier
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ ... - Mejogid, on 11/01/2007, -0/+2Does anyone know if there's any sort of equalizer plugin for this? It's something that is desperately needed when using most *nix media players, and alsa only can if you have a hardware mixer (which I don't and can't practically get on my laptop).
- init100, on 11/01/2007, -0/+2Maybe the userspace parts, but unless the PulseAudio project want to rewrite the kernel-level sound infrastructure, Alsa is not going away.
- antdude, on 10/31/2007, -0/+1http://duggmirror.com/linux_unix/PulseAudio_by_def ...
- marsbar, on 11/01/2007, -1/+2This is awesome. Exactly what I'm looking for. I love to listen to music while I browse the web. Every time I watch a flash video (Youtube etc) I have to manually pause or turn the volume down on Rhythmbox. According to the article one of the goals is to automagically turn down Rhythmbox to 20% volume and let the flash video play at 100% volume, once the video is done then Rhythmbox goes back to 100% automatically. This might be just the thing to get me to switch from Ubuntu to Fedora.
- mwiriadi, on 11/05/2007, -0/+1It replaces esd in fedora. I think it works the same way in kde as in it replaces arts and arts will refer to pulseaudio instead. That said I'm not 100% of the kde aspect I know thats the case now for esd.
- TeacherOfHeroes, on 10/31/2007, -0/+1Doesn't this already sort of exist in linux? I mean, you can mute the sound in one music player and still hear the sounds from another.
I suppose right now you need to have a volume control setting in the application, but still... - keyo, on 10/31/2007, -3/+4Is this an alternative to alsa?
- LinuxKitty, on 11/02/2007, -0/+1I'm actually glad to see some news about FC8. Switched to it (pre-release version) after Ubuntu 7.10 turned out to be a fiasco on my hardware (does not like the 8800GTS, does not like the motherboard's SATA controller), and I'm still very impressed with Fedora's relative maturity. (I didn't care for older versions, but FC8 is a huge leap forward.
- dinostabOMG, on 11/01/2007, -2/+3Yeah - dugg for Pizzicato Five.
- t3soro, on 10/31/2007, -3/+4fixed link: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPo ...
the new comment system sucks. - init100, on 11/01/2007, -2/+3Maybe they want to make sure it works correctly before shipping the system to users?
- tehmoth, on 10/31/2007, -0/+1ESound does that despite 'not cutting it'. I believe Network Audio System does that too.
- VinceNoir, on 11/01/2007, -0/+1Although ESD isn't perfect it CAN do what you ask. . I've been doing it for seven years now... The equivalent to DISPLAY is ESPEAKER. I use this for the following:
1. I have an Xvnc based application server set up at home for all my desktop work (my wife uses it too). Laptops are used as "thin clients" and VNC is the way I get a stateful desktop (ie. you disconnect and when you reconnect later it's right where you left it with all applications running etc... something X can't do when you use network transparency). The laptop is told to run an ESD server and the applications I run on the application server are given the ESPEAKER variable (ESPEAKER=192.168.1.5:16000). It works flawlessly for XMMS, Xine, MPlayer, etc...
2. My second use is actually quite stylish. I have a custom designed media center based on Gentoo :Linux. The PC is actually in the basement with a DVI and USB cable coming up to the living room through the wall behind the LCD HD Monitor. The mouse and KB are wireless. The amp is also downstairs but the speakers are near the monitor. It all works great. Even my three year old can easily use it to watch TV or DVD image files. But there was one problem I discovered after I set it up last Winter. There is no headphone jack! Doh! So if I want to watch a movie at a reasonable or even loud volume, I can't! Enter ESD. I set up all of my custom media scripts (watchtv, dvdimageplay, videoplay) with an additional option. If you call them from symlinks named rwatchtv, rdvdimageplay and rvideoplay, they will use ssh to remotely launch an ESD session on the livingroom laptop and then pass the ESPEAKER variable. So I can watch DirecTV, archived video or DVD images this way. Combine it with my media center playing back DVDs automatically that are inserted into the laptop and I'm probably about five years ahead of everyone else. :)
ESD does have latency issues and can get out of sync pretty easily. So when I watch something, sometime I have to use Xine's audio offset to compensate. But usually only once per viewing. This set up has allowed my wife and I to enjoy movies using headphones from the comfort of our couch. Now... if only I could find decent USB wireless headphones that work in Linux, we could cut the cable too.
With all of that said, it is my intention to move to Pulse Audio because it's much more capable than ESD. One of the main features that interest me because of my application server is the ability to route audio that was playing on one network node to another. I will finally be able to enable full functionality of my "follow me" desktop. The other point of interest is that you can also send audio to all pulse audio servers on the network. This would be perfect for IM apps. No matter where you were in the house, any of your nodes would notify you that a message came in. - sancho, on 11/01/2007, -1/+1This is really one of the few Vista features that I've considered to be an improvement. It's not exactly innovation, since similar systems were around long before Vista, but it's definitely something that Microsoft is doing that the main other desktop platforms (OS X and Linux) aren't doing yet.
My fear is that Linux/OS X will "copy" it and get blasted for patent infringement. - GMorgan, on 10/31/2007, -1/+1Bah, less monolithic tying of totally unrelated features we want. Having a network graphic system is insane enough, adding a sound one on top of it would be even worse. If people want these things they write a library that combines the necessary things above the primitive subsystems. This is sane software engineering rather than stark raving mad like X11.
As for PulseAudio, the best thing about it is we can emulate all the major Linux sound systems on top of it. If we can get everyone to agree to move to Pulse then we can finally put the mess that is Linux sound in some sort of order and that has to be good. - benderamp, on 11/02/2007, -0/+0A question - is pulse audio a substitution to sound servers like esd and arts, or it stands on a deeper level and would be used instead of alsa or oss? Will it work transparently for **all** programs which play the sound - from gnome, kde and console, or this would be only gnome's feature?
- benderamp, on 11/02/2007, -0/+0A question - is pulse audio a substitution to sound servers like esd and arts, or it stands on a deeper level and would be used instead of alsa or oss? Will it work transparently for >>all
- mediator, on 11/06/2007, -0/+0Awesome, fedora gets more appealing after every release!
- ToadLeg, on 11/01/2007, -1/+1in other words, eventually replace it.
- antdude, on 11/01/2007, -2/+1Bummer. Someone needs to make one!
- antdude, on 11/01/2007, -2/+1And old Windows versions (e.g., XP).
- Murdats, on 11/01/2007, -4/+2but arent these same audio features why people like creative are bitching about vista and are being slow to develop for it?
if creative is taking forever to do proper vista development, wont this mean linux users will be screwed over for a LOT longer as far as full driver support goes? - antdude, on 11/01/2007, -4/+2Do they exist for XP SP2 and Mac OS X?
- EvilWalksWithMe, on 11/01/2007, -5/+3They are just a little slow right?
- fatas, on 11/01/2007, -13/+10any chance of this being available in Ubuntu?
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