On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote: > You'll no doubt be aware, but: > http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/10/19/0155235/PulseAudio-Creator-Responds-To-Critics > > It's full of the usual ill informed rants, but obviously user experience is > a tough one to judge as a huge chunk of the "user experience" with pulse is > really down to the distros, and we have no control over that for most > distros :( > I'm also using pulseaudio for one of my product actually (just because the devices we ship have to work without altering the installed system). My experience as a developer is that PA is a nightmare, we are just using the PA Simple API. The App works flawlessly with Alsa, but with Ubuntu and the PA Alsa emulation layer the App crashed after reopening the devicenode the second time from the same process (this was with Ubuntu 9.04). So since Alsa started to crash with the PA emulation layer we added PA Simple support, this just crashed after the 5th time opening/closing the audio interface from the same process. Since this affected our application we decided to split off audio completely into a second process and we check if the process crashes - if so we'll restart the audio handling of our application. So when going through that I was certainly sure that noone ever tested PA properly and it was just picked up by the distributions. There should have been a big warning that PA is extremely unstable. I do not know about the current PA version (note we do not want the user to touch their system just in order to get our app work with it so they should not have to update PA - keep it simple) I'm not sure how far the latest PA code is I'll probably see in a half year when distributions have picked it up again. The PA features are nice, but please remember almost noone is using Audio via Network, almost noone is using the Xorg display export feature either. It's a nice to have but the most important thing is that audio works at all, PA was really bad for Linux and audio in that manner. (I don't want to start about applications which use nonblocking mmapped alsa transfer now....) Best Regards, Markus
