Comment 30 for bug 282316

Thanks a lot David et al,

Daniel thanks a great deal for your inputs. Here are some of my
observations.

PulseAudio for sure does not work at all on Intel HDA. My other laptop which
has nVIDIA HDA uses PulseAudio and I wouldn't say that sound worked out of
the box in that either. In general, after Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), the ALSA
driver had become quite stable. In 6.06 we still had problems and I could
not get the driver to recognize the headphone being plugged in. But this
retrogression in sound performance at the stage where Ubuntu is today is
simply unacceptable. We CANNOT have a poorly working sound system for a
machine that can perform composite management, virtualization and other
extreme technologies that were not standard just two years back. At this
stage of maturity, Ubuntu's choice of PulseAudio is frustrating and is also
a very very bad choice.

I don't even understand why PulseAudio needs to replicate the functionality
of ALSA. The whole advantage of open source is that you use the work someone
else has done and build upon it. PulseAudio should provide a sound server,
but should not interfere with ALSA. It should use ALSA or OpenSoundSystem
which are lower level modules. That is if at all it should exist. I don't
even see why that project is needed.

Finally, I'll try to check for all the configurations and compile a
resolution to the problem that I found. I could finally get all sound
functionality working fine on this laptop. But I need to think carefully as
to what all I actually did. For sure, I completely removed PulseAudio. But
in addition I also removed alsa-base, though not the complete alsa system.

Meanwhile, let me report one more observation:
A sound static sort of noise is heard often at bootup. This is the point
where libsound2 is being loaded. But the static noise is irritating. I found
that the noise is due to a couple of volume settings that are very high. I
fixed them and rebooted and it works without the noise. Sound recording is a
little noisy - but there could be ample ambient noise in my apartment too.

Thanks,
Balaji

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:18 AM, David Henningsson <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Balaji, I share your frustration over the sound system in Ubuntu. There
> are so many components; we have OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Gstreamer, Jack
> etc, and it is difficult to know where to start looking when things go
> wrong. Personally I share your view about PulseAudio - that it does not
> seem stable enough and that Ubuntu probably would be better off without
> it at the moment. Hopefully that will change in the near future.
>
> But also know that almost all of us are volonteers and luckily one of
> them (Daniel) has time to work with this issue. The best you can do at
> the moment is to have patience and continue to help the Ubuntu project
> in the ways that fit both you and the project (see
> http://www.ubuntu.com/community).
>
> --
> erratic elapsed time count in "sound recorder"
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/282316
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
Balaji