Re: [LAD] Guide to Linux Sound APIs

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:31:56 +0100
"Chris Cannam" <cannam@email-addr-hidden-day-breakfast.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Lennart Poettering
> <mzynq@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> > You can move any active stream on-the-fly to a different device.
> > Just right-click on it in pavucontrol.
>
> Wow, I never knew this program existed.
>
> Admittedly that doesn't say much, beyond that I'm too lazy to read the
> front page of your wiki. But I'd sort of assumed that if nice GUI
> configuration programs for PulseAudio existed, they would exist in the
> default install of the current Ubuntu, since it runs Pulse by default.
> And they don't.
>
> So, hey ho. There's no accounting for distributions.
>
> Nice utility. I installed it from the Ubuntu 8.04 repo; the first
> time I ran it (in a system where the soundcards were already being
> hogged by Flash and JACK and thus Pulse hadn't been able to open any
> outputs) it crashed on startup in a string assignment (segv in
> Glib::ustring::operator=, no other debug symbols available I'm
> afraid), but it worked when run against a working PulseAudio daemon.
> I assume the Ubuntu package isn't the freshest anyway.
>
>
> Chris

You're right that it's badly integrated. I don't know regular ubuntu
but ubuntu studio. There you need to start the 'pulse audio device
chooser' which starts the tray icon. rightclick on it does nothing,
left click opens the menu (that's where the fun UI-part starts IMHO..).
Then the user gets a list of other apps to start, most of them likely
unneeded. 'Volume control' (pavucontrol) is pretty much the only ui the
user needs. There's the next strange thing: half the functionality is
'hidden' behind the (IMHO unusual) right-click on various parts of the
ui. Yes, there's a hint on the bottom of the window, but still..

So yes, the ui is useful, but could be more useful (I wish I had a 5.1
to 2 downmix option in there :)), the ui could imho be better and it
could be far better integrated in the DE.
Note that this refers to the version in Ubuntu 8.04, I haven't seen any
other.

My personal conclusion is that it all could be useful but right now
it's more confusing than anything else.

Best Regards,
        Philipp
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Received on Wed Oct 1 04:15:01 2008