On 08/31/2011 09:15 AM, Eric Griffith wrote:
The way that I understood it... PulseAudio came along because Alsa and OSS couldn't reliably handle multiple applications outputting sound at the sametime.
Nope. ALSA handles multiple applications just fine. OSS v3 (the one that was in the kernel) has been deprecated for a long time and is now removed from the kernel almost entirely. OSS v4 can handle multiple apps just fine.
Now; one little caveat that was mentioned on the Arch Wiki was that DMIX can have really bad sampling by default, but that it was an easy fix under .asoundrc via " defaults.pcm.rate_converter "samplerate_best" " The downside to this was it caused higher CPU Usage; which as the industry says, CPU Power is cheap.
This is an issue if you're on a Pentium 1 100MHz machine or something like that. For anything that is not over 10 years old, the performance impact is virtually zero.
Fedora, Ubuntu, Mageia, they all install PulseAudio by default...but really, is it necessary now that CPU's are more powerful and DMIX has its bugs worked out? It just seems like one more layer of overhead, one more layer of lost preformance because of abstraction, and one more layer where something can go wrong.
PulseAudio provides per-application volume levels in the mixer which ALSA doesn't (OSS v4 does, but it's not a popular software since it doesn't support as many sound cards as ALSA). So PA solves that. It also provides easy support for Bluetooth sound devices and networking.
I don't use PA because I don't need networking for audio and don't have any Bluetooth devices, and per-application mixer volumes are provides by OSSv4 (I use that). But distros need to cover everything, so they went with PA. It isn't a bad idea for having most stuff work "out of the box" and it's not really heavy on resources (again, unless you're on some hopelessly outdated hardware.)
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