Steve,
'Linux world' has not 'moved' from ALSA to Pulse Audio. It is just that unfortunately, Pulse Audio is 'installed' by default in every Linux box, thus creating an up to 1 second lag between the moment audio software wants to emit sound and the moment your speaker/headphones emit that sound into the air.
Pulse Audio does not add anything to the Linux workstations in terms of audio functionality. It is just a wrapper around ALSA in most cases. It is just simpler to program for.
You can uninstall Pulse Audio and your sound will still work just fine, except for a handful of applications that require PA. In many cases PA does not even support hardware properly, where ALSA provides fine-grained control over mixers and ALSAmixer sometimes is the only option to get any sound from an adapter where PA produces silence.
The difference after uninstalling PA will be that there will no longer be huge latency - ALSA is instant. An average user might not notice the difference when they are playing music or videos (assuming video players even use PA). But try 2-way communication or music recording and PA will ruin everything. It is impossible to record when you are playing notes and hearing that a second later. Imagine 1 second delay between saying something and hearing it back. Lots of lag.
For the musicians who want to play and record this is horrible. This is just as horrible for the audio communications. It means that you are talking, but no one is hearing you for more than 1 second because network latency adds to the sound server latency which adds to ALSA latency. They are still talking about other stuff without hearing you. That creates a mess in the conversations.
PA is *somewhat* simpler to program for, but the price to pay is an enormous and unpredictable latency. Compare this: http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/ with this http://freedesktop.org/software/pulseaudio/doxygen/simple.html and you will realize that some things are done for the developers in PA where in ALSA they would have to write boilerplate code.
Using PA is one of the reasons why Jitsi will never be able to compete with Skype. Skype uses ALSA directly and thus has practically no latency even in Linux where APIs are slower than in Windows. For all the years I am administering IP communications I never noticed any latency variation between Linux or Windows Skype, but huge variations between Windows and Linux software that uses PA under Linux and DirectSound under Windows.
Jitsi team can keep status quo and trail Skype, or harness ALSA and get ahead of it as Jitsi has an advantage of being open source and supporting open source XMPP servers. Their call, but as long as Jitsi requires PA under Linux, it simply stands no chance against Skype - quality of voice will never be the same.
Thank you
Alex
···
-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces@jitsi.org [mailto:users-bounces@jitsi.org] On Behalf Of Steve Havelka
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:18 PM
To: users@jitsi.org
Subject: Re: [jitsi-users] PulseAudio microphone level
Thanks, Emil, for letting me know what's happening. I can try to see if any open source/free software applications set the mic level automatically (like Skype), and see how they do it.
As for Pulse-vs-alsa, I'm also not interested in debating it. I'd just like to mention that I'm glad that the Linux world has mostly switched to Pulse--I use its features daily. I don't think I'd be able to use Linux as my main workstation if the distribution developers hadn't moved on from Alsa some years back.
On 01/16/2014 07:54 AM, Alex Malmyguine wrote:
However you like it, I am not alone in realization that PulseAuido is an unnecessary monstrosity and you are limiting your user base by requiring it.
This is a fact of life, for your information, thus no need to debate it with me.
Thank you
Alex
-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces@jitsi.org [mailto:users-bounces@jitsi.org] On
Behalf Of Lyubomir Marinov
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 10:48 AM
To: Jitsi Users
Subject: Re: [jitsi-users] PulseAudio microphone level
This issue has already been reported to the Jitsi developers and an issue has already been opened, namely https://trac.jitsi.org/ticket/1050. Please express your interest in the issue there andtrack the future development there. As Emil said, you are welcome to contribute patches which address the issue.
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@jitsi.org
Unsubscribe instructions and other list options:
http://lists.jitsi.org/mailman/listinfo/users
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@jitsi.org
Unsubscribe instructions and other list options:
http://lists.jitsi.org/mailman/listinfo/users
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users@jitsi.org
Unsubscribe instructions and other list options:
http://lists.jitsi.org/mailman/listinfo/users