Am I the only person in the world who has never had anything but a pleasant experience with PulseAudio? The first time I noticed that I was using it, I had already been using it for a year...
I remember OSS and Alsa, and I don't miss either. As far as I can see, it makes Linux audio work like any other computer in this millennium.
I can't understand all the dislike of PulseAudio either. It certainly has a nicer API than /dev/dsp.
I previously had stock Debian on the machine, and everything was working fine. A half day's effort was put into toying with ALSA configs that Pulse was deferring to for whatever driver choices it made. Dozens of help articles or threads where everyone else in the world could proclaim "Thanks, that fixed it for me!" left me with less functionality than I started with.
The only thing Pulse has ever done right for me was was help to record some loopback audio on an otherwise-crippled sound card.
(After a few months of trying to make pulse work I left for FreeBSD, which works beautifully and avoids a lot of linux's change (seemingly) for the sake of change)
- How often do you reboot your computer
- What audio softwares you use the most
For me, PA crashes around once a week (and this is with the latest version I tried), or just plain stops working (like muting the sound, garbled sound, etc)
Not to mention the delay that happens while switching songs in mplayer for example. Use ALSA and song switch is instantaneous.
Once every two or three months, when I remember to apply updates.
> - What audio softwares you use the most
Only flash (youtube, primarily. Also youtube's html5 player probably, I haven't paid much attention to that) and mplayer. A few years ago, XMMS2. I used to use an XMMS2 client I wrote for music, now I just use some bash scripts and mplayer; I can't say I've noticed any delay while switching songs with mplayer or XMMS2.
When I play music from my laptop through my raspberry pi connected to my TV with pusleaudio, then I notice an audio delay. That is the only sore spot pulseaudio has ever presented me.
About the delay, try this: mplayer *mp3 (in a directory with mp3 files, of course), then press >. There should be a significant delay in switching songs (like, 0.5s). Make sure mplayer shows it's using the [Pulse] driver
With ALSA this is very fast
There's a good possibility that this is mplayer's fault more than PA's.
I will admit having a lot of a hate for figuring out which audio 'profile' is which...
If you've got the plugs for 7.1 and a normal line in as well as possibly a digital one, they you've probably got 23 choices of profile for your built in audio device. Add in a GPU with HDMI and the NVIDIA driver and you probably get at least another 7+ choices all labeled Nvidia... I find I frequently have to guess multiple times whenever I hook up a TV via HDMI.
But it works quite well if you define works as works without adding on any usability riders.