Karmic Koala brief rant/rave and sound advice...literally.

[Ghost|BTFH]

I don't know about any of you, but I love the new features of 9.10. There are a few pet peeves, like a super communication notifier that doesn't do anything at all (just sits there like a bump on a log, never notices mail, IMs, anything on my system - it's happened on other people's systems right out of the box, and they have it marked as a low priority, c'mon devs...if the thing doesn't work at all, that's not a low priority.)

Anyhow, I digress...the REAL ISSUE I have with our sweet cuddly Koala is he's using Pulse still. Bad Koala! Put down the inferior sound server!

Just a suggestion to those who hate Pulse as much as I do (which would only be a scarce few in this world, I'm sure...) they have made it amazingly easy to take care of.

First, simply go into Synaptic Package Manager (System - Administration - Synaptic Package Manager for those of you who are new) and do a search for pulseaudio. From this search, find PulseAudio and PulseAudio-utils and mark both for removal (don't panic when it tells you it's going to remove the desktop, it won't remove "the desktop").

After this, search for ALSA and install alsa-oss and (I personally do this even though it's not needed) alsa-tools.

Reboot.

You're now running a system without cracks, pops, hisses, lagging sound, lockups, audio mysteriously dropping out from one program but not another, etc etc etc.

With this setup I can run a game under wine (winecfg audio set for ALSA) listen to music on rhythmbox and still hear bloops from my instant messenger (Pidgin of course, who'd want to use Empathy until they add a feature to NOT LOG EVERY CONVERSATION YOU HAVE...silly devs)

This post has been part rant, part rave and part advice. If the rant offended you, I apologize. It's just my opinion. If the rave excited you, it should! Aside from a few issues, Karmic Koala is a beautiful build. If the advice helped - awesome. Glad to be of service.

For flames or anything else, I direct you to the "Reply" button...go ahead, you know you want to...it'll make you feel better in the end...you can go off and tell me how awesome Pulse is.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH

[5nak3]

Hi there, this is an interesting post as I did notice a sound drop when trying to play Urban Terror, which made the game freeze and the only way to shutdown was through ctrl+alt+f1 and "killall" I did notice in this instance pulseaudio was also eating a lot of my resources as shown by my "top" list.

Another thing I've noticed in Karmic as opposed to Jaunty was in Karmic you cannot really control the individual controls for volume as Jaunty allowed e.g. Master, PCM, headphone etc were all controllable by the sound applet in the top panel in Karmic this is not the case. In fact the applet seems overly complicated.

I managed to correct this by installing GNOME Alsa Mixer although it is a clunky way of sorting out my sound.

So my question if you could answer is this:

Pulseaudio has only shown one problem for me so far (Urban Terror incident), it works without cracks and pops etc, would I benefit from Alsa instead of Pulse what is the underlying difference? And what was Jaunty using?

Many Thanks

[Erszebet Lunah]

Oooh such a nice reply button...must..resist...presssiiinggaaaaah! Too late ><

Also; pulse-*fweet*-audio ro-*krrrr*-cks !!


Since I can't risk losing a working system (read: no other OS installed...) I think I'll wait a little longer before an upgrade is in order...

[Ghost|BTFH]

So my question if you could answer is this:

Pulseaudio has only shown one problem for me so far (Urban Terror incident), it works without cracks and pops etc, would I benefit from Alsa instead of Pulse what is the underlying difference? And what was Jaunty using?

Many Thanks

Mmmm...well, at the risk of being flamed into oblivion, I'll tell you. Pulseaudio is a clunky, inelegant resource hog of a sound server that couldn't graciously kill a process even if it went to assassination school for a year.

ALSA is professional, smooth, been around for years and years, isn't a resource hog, works fantastically, gives you more options for your hardware than you may ever want to see (depending on your hardware) and sounds beautiful.

Now, the downsides...Pulseaudio is a sound SERVER, which honestly is it's major malfunction. It doesn't focus so much on doing one thing right, as it does doing half a dozen things wrong.

ALSA is NOT a sound SERVER. It runs sound on YOUR system and YOUR system alone. It is also closed source, not open source software. And by that I mean there are a few drivers etc that they don't share the code for.

Now, if you are a purist who wants your system to be 100% pure open source (and just the fact that you want some decent sound on your system kind of defeats that whole idea right there) then you would NOT want ALSA, as it has some closed source elements.

So, to use the assassin analogy again, you may choose to use the 13 year old on a sugar high with a mail opener who will share all the gory details with you...

Or you may choose the professional gentleman from Italy who will not tell you how he did it, just that the job got done.

In short, ALSA will give you more system resources, cleaner sound and better responsiveness.

Jaunty was also using Pulseaudio...this ugly beast has been around for a few distros now and I fear it's not going away, even with all the people saying they hate it (and the majority finding ways to work around it as a 1st step in making the "perfect" desktop). I think that there's enough developers and fans that quite frankly, those who make the big decisions on what goes into Ubuntu, never hear the dissent.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH

[mellery]

How do I use my laptops sound media keys (up, down, mute) and also my soundlevel in the taskbar have disappeared. Do you know how I can get those back? Removing pulsaaudio did fix all my sound playback problems though!

[Ghost|BTFH]

How do I use my laptops sound media keys (up, down, mute) and also my soundlevel in the taskbar have disappeared. Do you know how I can get those back? Removing pulsaaudio did fix all my sound playback problems though!

Try System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts and see if those might just do the trick for you.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH

[mellery]

those look like they are set up right, but maybe they are still trying to change the volume with pulseaudio?

[Ghost|BTFH]

those look like they are set up right, but maybe they are still trying to change the volume with pulseaudio?

I wish I knew a lot about such things, but sadly I have limited knowledge in this area...

What I could suggest is trying to create some custom key commands:

System - Preferences - Keyboard Shortcuts

Click "Add"

Give it a name like: "ALSA Volume Up"
Give it a command of: "aumix -v +5"

Then bind it to your volume up button.

Then do the same thing (command being "aumix -v -5") for Volume Down

Then perhaps one for mute (command being simply "mute")

Not sure if these would work or not (as I have kicked Koala to the curb until they fix more bugs...like when Lucid comes out) but these are some suggestions that might help.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH

[mellery]

those work great! thanks again! I'll try PA again next release, but its too much trouble trying to get it to work

[Ghost|BTFH]

those work great! thanks again! I'll try PA again next release, but its too much trouble trying to get it to work

No problem, happy to help. I have an older keyboard (from around y2k) that has a ton of multimedia keys, no branding, and letter keys that have almost turned pure black from excessive use. There's a couple of the multimedia keys that I wanted to make useful again (Like the old DOS key I wanted to use to fire up my terminal, the phone button I wanted to set up for Skype, etc.) so I just did some simple study on it.

And yes, you could actually turn your volume up button to open email if you wanted. It's really simple once you know the tricks.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH