pulse audio. What's the benefit?

[martinbaselier]

Since a lot of people seem happy with pulse audio (when they don't have problems with it), I decided to give it a try and installed it.

Apart from using 2-10% of my cpu and about 200MB of my virtual memory, I don't see any added funtionality. I can direct multiple sound sources to it, but I already was able to do that with my normal soundcard driver. The only difference is: With pulse I'm not able to set the volume of the different streams. I thought that was supposed to be one of the added features.

If I look in synaptic, it seems pavucontrol is the tool for that, but it breaks up my install. I need to remove several essential things to give that a try, so I'm not going to do that.

Could someone tell me what benefits pulse adds for normal usage?

[martinbaselier]

*bump*

[martinbaselier]

Is it such a hard question. I know it's supposed to be a network sound server. Doesn't anybody know what I can do with it on a single machine with a single sound card? I must be installed by default for some reason. I don't suppose the ubuntu creators think everybody wants to set up a network sound server by default.

[martinbaselier]

*bump*

[cotcot]

For me it is even a problem. I have de-installed pulse audio to be able to get sound in different apps that run at the same time (for instance audacity and blender).

[binbash]

Pulse audio is just a problem in my opinion, i always uninstall it on every distro i use.

[markbuntu]

The problem is not really pulseaudio but its crappy implementation in ubuntu. It works much better in Fedora and Mandriva and other distros.

[igorzwx]

Mark!
You are great!

"The idea was correct, but it was applied in a wrong way".
This is exactly how Russian Marxists explained the failure of
the Communist Utopia.

[binbash]

The problem is not really pulseaudio but its crappy implementation in ubuntu. It works much better in Fedora and Mandriva and other distros.

Yes it is great at Fedora 11 and crap on Ubuntu but this does not change the topic.

[markbuntu]

If you only have one sound card I doubt that you will gain much, and probably lose a lot without installing pavucontrol which is necessary to actually control pulseaudio since it is the pulse audio volume control and the place where you can control the volume of individual streams. Installing pulseaudio without pavucontrol is really defeating the purpose of pulseaudio.

If you have more than one hardware sound device then pulseaudio can make your life a lot easier.