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

[solwic]

No thank-you for Ghost|BTFH; the only thing this has gotten me is absolutely NO sound and no recognition of my sound card by the system.
Geez, don't go around telling people to do stuff that doesn't work at all.

Worked great for me in Jaunty on my Acer Aspire 3680. Yeah, it's a few years old, and nowhere near top of the line, but ditching pulse and adding alsa actually makes my system sound better. And the glitches are gone, the hiccups, the lagging...all gone with pulse.

But hey, use whatever works for you. Just don't say this stuff "doesn't work at all"; it worked wonders for me.

[Nick Brohman]

Worked great for me in Jaunty on my Acer Aspire 3680. Yeah, it's a few years old, and nowhere near top of the line, but ditching pulse and adding alsa actually makes my system sound better. And the glitches are gone, the hiccups, the lagging...all gone with pulse.

But hey, use whatever works for you. Just don't say this stuff "doesn't work at all"; it worked wonders for me.

I'm with you solwic.

Further to my previous post I added Gnome Mixer ALSA from synaptics & all is OK.

One thing that I have found is that the Mic boosts will create snap, crackle & pop...I mute or turn down both boosts & I find this mixer to be a vast improvement on 9.04.

Cheers...Ncko

[Tamlynmac]

solwic
Worked great for me in Jaunty on my Acer Aspire 3680. Yeah, it's a few years old, and nowhere near top of the line, but ditching pulse and adding alsa actually makes my system sound better. And the glitches are gone, the hiccups, the lagging...all gone with pulse.

+2
Seems to be contagious.

[Shelton2142]

The only sound related problem I've been having is with the speakers I have connected to the front ports on my system unit. I plug in and it doesn't have any sound coming out. The back ports seem to be functioning just fine, though. That's where my monitor's sound is hooked up. I use a 24-inch Acer LCD with built-in rear speakers.. I know it's specifically a problem with Karmic, because when I restart and boot with Windows XP, the speakers work again.

[jackmetal]

Unfortunately it didn't work for me.

It's crazy.. All of my speakers (7.1) worked fine in 8.10 (I managed to get them working fine in 9.04), but only the front work in 9.10. Seems to be getting worse with each release. LOL

[michaelzap]

Unfortunately it didn't work for me.

Didn't work for me either. I removed Pulseaudio and installed Alsa and after that I had no sound at all (and no devices listed). So I went back to the way it was before.

[Zoot7]

No thank-you for Ghost|BTFH; the only thing this has gotten me is absolutely NO sound and no recognition of my sound card by the system.
Geez, don't go around telling people to do stuff that doesn't work at all.

Just reverse the changes made in synaptic and re-install what you removed in the line of pulseaudio packages, and everything should go back to as it once was. That's the beauty of using packages.

[damilaredavids]

I have removed the pulseaudio and installed the alsa-oss as suggested but i still don not have sound from my external speakers. i can't even see the sound icon on the taskbar. System>Preferences>Sound does not bring any thing up...

What do i do pls...?

[beniwtv]

OK; I just can't resist jumping in this time

To all people that still get it wrong, PulseAudio is NOT an ALSA replacement. ALSA is also NOT a PulseAudio replacement. ALSA is NOT a sound server, PulseAudio IS a sound server.

In fact, they're completely different applications, on different layers that can't even be compared at all.

ALSA is the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. This is a set of drivers and libraries that get your sound card working. Without ALSA, there would be no sound at all.

Many applications can speak to ALSA directly, outputting sound to your sound card. ALSA can even mix more than one application's output together, if your sound card has no mixer (pretty common that onboard sound cards lack these).

ALSA can do some more things, but that practically is all what's to it. An API to input/output sound across many different devices and drivers.

However, in recent years, desktop operating systems like Windows or OS X have provided users with some advanced features, like network audio, audio volume control for each application, etc...

In Linux, we did have some applications that took care of providing "some" of these features, but they were either lacking in features or plain to difficult for a new user to configure.

So there comes PulseAudio. It's set out to provide many advanced features, whilst being easy to use for the user. Basically the idea was to "clean up" the Linux Audio sound server mess.

Today, PulseAudio is a sound server operating ON TOP of ALSA with features like network audio, independent volume control for each application, grouping of sound cards, changing outputs of applications to a different sound card/output on the fly, and many more I probably forget here.

Now, every new technology has it's share of problems. PulseAudio was no different. In the first versions it was quite buggy and problematic, but these problems are largely solved in recent releases of PulseAudio & Ubuntu.

Nowadays, if you experience problems with PulseAudio, it's mostly because of buggy ALSA drivers, or your computer simply being too ancient to handle the load (and no, it's not much, I'm talking about _ancient_ computers with < 500 MHZ, not your 1.6 GHZ Pentium 4!).

Instead of whining here or elsewhere, which does not help at all, file bugs, help the developers of both ALSA and PulseAudio to solve these problems. Telling others to "drop it" because it's *** is not very constructive.

/Just my 2cents here...

PS: My PulseAudio in Ubuntu works just fine in Karmic. That being said, I never had any problems in Ubuntu with sound...

[Ghost|BTFH]

I do truly understand that, as I said in my original post - most feel Pulse is a fantastic little sound server.

To be fair, Pulse does a great job for most people, right up to the point where you decide to be silly and have more than one program grabbing for sound at the same time (usually 3 or more) at which point for my system at the very least, it hogs resources and generally tends to crash, leaving me with a lovely (and often loud) looping of sound similar to what I think an android would sound like having an epileptic seizure.

So, to those who feel it works perfectly, keep it and be happy. For those who don't feel it works perfectly, what I suggested at the beginning worked fine for me - your mileage may vary! (I can't believe in this day and age I have to give that caveat...)

To those who tried this and suddenly have no sound at all, did you attempt to do this when you already had working sound that had no issues or did you have problems and wanted to fix them?

If it's the first one, shame on you - if it works, it's not broke, don't fix it!

If it's the second, my solution is not the ONLY solution, it's just what worked for me. You try it, you win or you lose. If you lose, you simply go back and put the same stuff in that you had before and you've hit square one again.

Now to those for whom this procedure has worked well - fantastic, glad I could help.

For those it has not helped at all - you have my sympathies. Not every solution works for every machine.

For those it ruined their lives, blew up their machine, or just generally made things worse - you have my sympathies. Not every solution works for every machine.

For those who have jumped into the PulseAudio pulpit and spoken the holy words of faith in Pulse - Say what you want, my sound works, my system is stable and my resources aren't being hogged.

Finally, for those who say it's IMPOSSIBLE to do this - it's done. It's on my computer, it works. I don't care if it's not possible to be done, because I already went and did it.

Cheers,
Ghost|BTFH