PulseAudio as a sound output?

[Jan Zerebecki]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 06:22:19PM -0500, King InuYasha wrote:
> While PulseAudio can work through ALSA, it makes you lose the finer grains
> of control over audio when it is sent through ALSA to PulseAudio.

Then it seems that is a limitation of the alsa plugin pulseaudio
provides. Fixing that plugin would not only benefit Wine when it
uses pulseaudio through alsa but every application which might do
this. Implementing a winepulseaudio would only bring that benefit
to Wine and it would have to be duplicated for every other alsa
application which pulseaudio would want to support.

> It is also
> redundant in most cases, since PulseAudio generally will be connected to
> localhost to ALSA on localhost, so it is not very smart to rely on winealsa
> to connect to PulseAudio.

> Sending audio output through ALSA/OSS to
> any audio server is basically redundant and pointless. Sending to the Audio
> Server to ALSA/OSS is better.

I guess you didn't want to say that the audio is sent over ip.
Though I don't know how pulseaudio does things specifically, I do
know what is technically possible. Passing data from one process
to another on the same computer can be done without copying the
data. Also passing the data into the alsa library which passes it
into the hardware or dmix or the pulseaudio plugin does not
involve two steps as you seem to suggest, but only one. Yes
alsa->pulseaudio is an additional layer but you could think of it
as a replacement of pulsaudio-api->pulseaudio.

> That way, there isn't a conflict between audio
> streams to send to audio output.

Any mixing resolves this conflict, the only thing that does not
support this is bare oss.


Jan