Will PulseAudio ever work properly?

[YeOK]

PulseAudio is awesome. It Works great for me, I don't miss the ALSA mixer days at all.

[Giant Speck]

Karmic is actually the first release where sound has worked fairly well for me. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same thing about other things, like Flash.

[Regenweald]

pulse would be phenomenal if all its blind detractors contributed a few hours of dedicated testing and bug reporting. Having said that, since hardy, my only audio problems came in the Karmic testing cycle.

[phenest]

I've not had a problem with PA until Karmic. It works just dandy in Jaunty.

[VertexPusher]

PulseAudio is still broken and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

All those who think their sound is working fine should take a look at the system monitor. Then remove PulseAudio and take another look.

Any application that uses sound takes 100% CPU with PulseAudio installed. How anyone can consider this normal or even acceptable is beyond me. I have a Core i7 with 8 virtual CPU cores, and after starting several sound apps (normal stuff such as Totem, Firefox with Flash, Skype, nothing special) I literally hear my CPU fan speed up. This never happened with Jaunty + ALSA, and it stopped happening right after I removed PulseAudio from Karmic.

However, things get worse with Karmic because now for the first time in Ubuntu's history, some basic GNOME applications (Nautilus, Terminal) actually refuse to start up if PulseAudio is absent. So now users are literally forced to either put up with a broken sound system or switch distros.

Unless I find a way to make those GNOME apps work again, I will say goodbye to Ubuntu and switch to Debian. The Debian devs have enough common sense to make PulseAudio an optional component which is not installed by default and not required for anything.

Ubuntu's PulseAudio mess has been around for 2 years now. With each upgrade I gave PulseAudio a fair chance and tried using it. But it failed every time. ALSA, on the other hand, just works. I never had issues with ALSA. And yes, ALSA is perfectly capable of software mixing, in fact has been so for at least five years.

At some point Canonical will have to pull the plug and bail out of the PulseAudio mess if they really care about making Ubuntu a viable option on the desktop. In its current state, Karmic will lose any benchmark comparison with Mac OS Snow Leopard and Windows 7. And it will suck laptop batteries empty faster than any other OS during audio operations.

[FuturePilot]

PulseAudio is still broken and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

All those who think their sound is working fine should take a look at the system monitor. Then remove PulseAudio and take another look.

Any application that uses sound takes 100% CPU with PulseAudio installed. How anyone can consider this normal or even acceptable is beyond me. I have a Core i7 with 8 virtual CPU cores, and after starting several sound apps (normal stuff such as Totem, Firefox with Flash, Skype, nothing special) I literally hear my CPU fan speed up. This never happened with Jaunty + ALSA, and it stopped happening right after I removed PulseAudio from Karmic.

However, things get worse with Karmic because now for the first time in Ubuntu's history, some basic GNOME applications (Nautilus, Terminal) actually refuse to start up if PulseAudio is absent. So now users are literally forced to either put up with a broken sound system or switch distros.

Unless I find a way to make those GNOME apps work again, I will say goodbye to Ubuntu and switch to Debian. The Debian devs have enough common sense to make PulseAudio an optional component which is not installed by default and not required for anything.

Ubuntu's PulseAudio mess has been around for 2 years now. With each upgrade I gave PulseAudio a fair chance and tried using it. But it failed every time. ALSA, on the other hand, just works. I never had issues with ALSA. And yes, ALSA is perfectly capable of software mixing, in fact has been so for at least five years.

At some point Canonical will have to pull the plug and bail out of the PulseAudio mess if they really care about making Ubuntu a viable option on the desktop. In its current state, Karmic will lose any benchmark comparison with Mac OS Snow Leopard and Windows 7. And it will suck laptop batteries empty faster than any other OS during audio operations.

I'm running a number of audio applications right now with PA and none of them are taking up 100% CPU. Are you using the old version of Skype or the new Beta version? The old version and a serious issue with PA where it would peg the CPU at 100%

[Icehuck]

The real question is, "Will sound ever work perfectly in Linux?"

Apple and Microsoft got it right in the early 90's,and here in 2009, Linux still hasn't gotten right.

[regomodo]

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[Странник]

I've never had a problem with alsa, but I had a lot of problems with pa

[andrewabc]

I've had to stay with Jaunty because the crackling and pops I got from Karmic are unbearable. It has been said that PA works fine in other distros and only Ubuntu has this problem.

Make sure that has nothing to do with this bug
crackling sound
That's what my karmic had and it turned out to be audio power saving feature that was broken. But easily fixable.