pulseaudio - O how I hate thee

[Reel]

I don't think I have an exotic setup but I cannot figure out how to get pulseaudio to work. In F8, I gave up and removed all pulseaudio packages from the system so I could get back to ALSA. I play all sound from my digital coax port of a Sound Blaster Live Value and I am stumped on how to get that to work in pulseaudio now that I have transitioned to F9.

To make me feel worse, I saw a comment in the release notes of F9 that all sound cards should work automatically by now. I can get sound working just fine in ALSA alone in F8. I have no idea what to do to make it work in pulseaudio and the instructions seem to be so sparse as to imply it should be automatic. Am I alone in my frustration or is somebody with familiarity willing to lend a hand and troubleshoot?

 

[aceO07]

It seems like in Ubuntu 8.04 with pulseaudio that I can't play flash video and regular videos at the same time with audio now. If I have a flash video open first, the vlc/media player will not have sound and visa versa.

 

[imported_nightfox]

Originally posted by: aceO07
It seems like in Ubuntu 8.04 with pulseaudio that I can't play flash video and regular videos at the same time with audio now. If I have a flash video open first, the vlc/media player will not have sound and visa versa.

I had the same problem and solved by using ALSA instead of pulseaudio.

 

[Reel]

I fought for about 5 hours today. I have finally succeeded in getting my sound working as I expect. I am not sure that the benefits from pulseaudio are really happening such as multiple audio streams. I have also encountered a few problems that make no sense to me but I was able to work around them to make it come together such as file permissions being set wrong on start-up for my usage scenario. I believe that pulseaudio is far from ready for primetime.

As nightfox said, ALSA instead of pulseaudio is a far less stressful path and that is what I had done in the past.

Tomorrow I will attempt to follow some directions I stumbled across at the nvnews forum and bookmarked. These should allow me to drop xorg back to a stable version and use the nvidia proprietary drivers.

 

[Reel]

Well, to close things up here, I followed the directions I found. I managed to get things working to the best that I could. My HD playback (in MythTV) was never at the quality it reached in Fedora 8 and so I gave up on Fedora 9 and went back to 8. It was a rewarding step to have everything start functioning exactly as I wanted.

In other words, I have once again given up on pulseaudio. I have also given up on the new KDE and new Xorg. I am not at all impressed with whatever was causing my HD playback to stutter so excessively.

 

[imported_nightfox]

KDE 4.0.3 is more of a beta than a final release imo. I'm personally waiting until 4.1 fully try it out as the current one is missing a lot of features.