Comment 5 for bug 579300

Hello Daniel T Chen.

For one thing I thank You very well As by letting remove the oss emu it finnally guided me to a serious general multimedia audio bug which went sometimes that far in freezing video applications as well. This problem started for me as from ubuntu 9.10 (and many many users are confronted with it)
Oh yes we still found some work arounds (many times very time consuming and complicated). Finnaly All those bugs and audio problems leaving A majority off users who uses modern audio cards and or Motherboards built in chipset like realtek 889A using hda audio without audio at all.

The real bug is just pulse audio . Pulse audio indeed supports only a very very limited basic audio devices. So is it intentional ? It is now in use for long time and nothing changed about this. The several different analog inputs like cd in extra line in hda frontpannel out are not supported. and not configurable. And then as well i even dont spoke about the external spdif digital audio in and so on ... Pulse audio does bug the general alsa working when using hda audio. Since even the most simple laptop is now equiped with hda audio I don't now what Your trying. I perfectly understand that it is a hell of a job and very time consuming what Your attempting now, But believe me as long pulse audio itself is not furhter developped in order to support our provides the ability tho configuring support for all audio cards, it's a waste of time.

Now slowly we are running up to the point that a lot of users just uninstall and purge first all basic linux audio alsa and pulse. Take basic alsa source compile it and run without sound server like pulse leaving system sounds unusable. But at least their multimedia applications are working then.
Now on maverick this is even not enough anymore but users will be forced to recompile their kernel. Well I don't think that this last is for all users. I even did not mention the users who just simply reverted to bloody windows due to this audio problem I agree not very smart but I can understand them. As ubuntu is particullary unstable now for multimedia applications.

So it would be very nice if.

You would actually make Your own kernel for You and other pulse audio maintainers for developping purposes or eventually provide an updated basic ubuntu kernel using libesd-als0 and esd sound server. So persons who need and have evoluated audio cards are able to use the audio like it is forseen.

Only force the implementation from pulse audio the day it is developped for use with all audio cards, or at least has a configuration option to set correct audio cards settings channel and stack's like we can do into alsa-base.conf
options snd-hda-intel model=asus-p5q for example (my case)
This option will unfortunatly be needed as the automatic polling of audio devices true bios does not give this needed info. It only will give info about chipset and audio codecs used but no info about channels used. This is the case for all hda audio cards who uses more then simply basic chanels mic and line.

Also An easy use complete mixer is anyway a requirement for Multimedia users. So yes We all use gnome-alsa-mixer now,
but pulse bugs in some cases with this mixer leaving pc without audio at all. The volume control from pulse is very user unfriendly and this not give a good overview about what is muted and so on.

At last I'm well happy to be able to give one positif feedback , The fact that we can amplifie the audio coming from applications like rhytmbox for example up to 140 % is very nice and particularly ussefull when using headphone as to low volume was sometimes a problem into ubuntu before.

Thank's if You would take this into consideration as This would solve problems for a lot users eighter most of multimedia users with ubuntu.