Pulseaudio

Pulseaudio is an interesting old way to allow audio to be carried or duplicated and perhaps other useful things. I am an Electrical Engineer and studied the idea of mixing a lot of audio signals on a high frequency. This is what Mr.Lennart Poettering is trying to do with what he calls Pulseaudio. I don't know just how it is done but it does work.

I got Pulseaudio working on my Fedora 8 operating system and it appeared to be working properly, but I didn't know enough about it to test many features. But I did discover that two non-Fedora applications called Skype and gMFSK will not function with Pulseaudio in operation.

This problem I ask Lennart at Pulseaudio and he said this:

On Thu, 10.01.08 09:13, Karl Larsen (k5di@zianet.com) wrote:

...

I got pulseaudio working on F8 and the normal audio on movies and

such is fine. But I tried gMFSK which is an application that uses the sound-card DSP engine. It looks fine but when I try to receive digital data it suffers very bad interference and it will not transmit because it says /dev/dsp is busy.

gMFSK seems to be a program that uses OSS (/dev/dsp) directly. For those you have two options:

1) Use "padsp" to redirect it to PA. Just prefix your application call with "padsp".

2) Use "pasuspender" to temporarily tell PA to give up access to the audio device. This is probably the better way to fix this if you need lowest-possible latencies. (I am not sure if you need those, but I assume so, given this seems to be some modem sw?)

...

Sype comes up fine and appears to receive data but when I try to

call anyone or answer a call they can't hear me at all, and all I hear is noise.

Skype is closed source software. It's very difficult to get this working out of the box for you, due to its nature.

http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#Skype

Lennart

-- Lennart Poettering Red Hat, Inc. lennart [at] poettering [dot] net ICQ# 11060553 http://0pointer.net/lennart/ GnuPG 0x1A015CC4 _______________________________________________ pulseaudio-discuss mailing list

I did both things and neither got my gMFSK or Skype working. There is more to this than I have knowledge of.

This problem caused me to delete all the pulseaudio from my F8 computer with yum remove *pulseaudio" which was a huge list! I did it and nothing worked on the F8 system after that. I had to re-load F8 and it came up working fine. But now, after removing the pulseaudio software I cannot yum vlc from livna any more.

Pulseaudio is a big error in my opinion. It does nothing a normal user of Fedora wants but raises all kinds of issues with other software. I really think Fedora needs to leave Pulseaudio off it's systems.

Karl