Will PulseAudio ever work properly?

[phenest]

Why? if PA is needed to provide functionality, why should devs waste time reimplementing that functionality. Should they port gnome to QT so GTK isn't a dependency? What about OSS is it gnomes job to support OSS3 and OSS4 too?

All of this is irrelevant as AFAIK its down to how ubuntu package gnome, not gnome itself.

Huh!? I never said it was the fault of Gnome, just that it should be removable with losing anything in Gnome. Try removing libpulse0 without removing any part of Gnome. Removing PA should allow you to fall back to ALSA (or whatever). Nothing more, nothing less.

[Warpnow]

<Insert Anything Here> will never work properly. By the time it receives enough upgrades to be stable, it will have been replaced by a shinier, more bug-ridden piece of technology.

This law is universal.

[VertexPusher]

To answer my own question: removing PA stops the hardware volume controls from working.

Fixing the crackling and pops might be fixable, but until I get proper control of my LFE channel as I do in Jaunty, I won't be upgrading to Karmic.

As I said before, you can install gnome-alsamixer as a replacement.

Yes, Gnome depends on libpulse0, but there's no need to remove that. Just remove pulseaudio, gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio and vlc-plugin-pulse (if VLC is installed).

If that is too much customization for you, consider switching to Kubuntu which is PulseAudio-free by default.

[VertexPusher]

I preferred to do so, in order to avoid possible headches upon the next upgrade to Lynx.

What headaches?

Changes performed by the package manager are much easier to undo than manual changes to system configuration files. If I want to revert my system to its original state, all I need to do is reinstall the "ubuntu-desktop" metapackage because it depends on all the packages I removed earlier and will pull them back in automatically.

However, if you change configuration files manually, you are on your own. There is no automatic way to revert them. You have to keep track of all the changes yourself.

[Yeti can't ski]

What headaches?

Changes performed by the package manager are much easier to undo than manual changes to system configuration files. If I want to revert my system to its original state, all I need to do is reinstall the "ubuntu-desktop" metapackage because it depends on all the packages I removed earlier and will pull them back in automatically.

However, if you change configuration files manually, you are on your own. There is no automatic way to revert them. You have to keep track of all the changes yourself.

You are absolutely right. Still, mine is just the lazy man solution.

In addition to a few cracks, my greatest problem with PulseAudio is having proper sound in OSS legacy software (Quake3 mods in particular), which I really don't use often anyway.

With the workaround, I can still effectively kill the bloody PA when I want or need to, without losing the standard volume applet and standard sound controls (even though gnome-alsamixer indeed rocks).

[kuric]

I'm having problems with Pulse Audio on Ubuntu 9.10.
Eg: Can't play Second Life without crashing because of PA.
Never had that problem on Ubuntu 9.04.
I had to replace it and install Esound. No more crashes now.

[MeduZa]

Pulse Audio works flawlessly on my 3 Installed Karmic Systems.

1 Soundblaster Audigy 2
1 Soundblaster X-Fi
and 1 Integrated Audio

Its like upgrading from a 10" Black & White TV to a 60" HD TV .. its 1000 times better than what we had before.

I have a SB audigy2 and when I select 5.1 analog output the sound get crapy! I removed PA and now I have no volume control

[Yeti can't ski]

I removed PA and now I have no volume control

Yeap, PA is much more deeply integrated with Karmic Koala than ever befora. A bug has been file on the issue and so on...

Still, you can control sound through gnome-alsamixer if you want...

In my case, I stop the autospawn of PA and then created a script with "killall pulseaudio" + "pulseaudio -D" in order to run legacy applications that are incompatible with it.