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Re: anyone experience with pulseaudio on here?

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Re: anyone experience with pulseaudio on here?

Subject: Re: anyone experience with pulseaudio on here?
From: Paul Davis <email@hidden>
Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2015 09:40:27 -0500

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 5:07 AM, René J.V. <email@hidden> wrote:

On Tuesday February 03 2015 17:39:19 Paul Davis wrote:

>The role PA plays on Linux is played by CoreAudio on OS X. There's very
>little point in using PA on top of CoreAudio.
>
>In fact, PA's original developer specifically did not want ANY applications
>(or even libraries) to use the PA API directly. Sadly, many developers have

Isn't that a contradiction? PA playing a CoreAudio-like role on Linux means using its API directly, instead of using it as a server, no? That's how it's intended to be used - a server, right?

Thing is, someone did develop a CA module for PA, and when we filed a bug PA report about its default settings on OS X there was immediate feedback from one of the devs. I'm guessing there's a reason for that, and that reason is probably that there are a lot of apps out there that can use PulseAudio for their sound playback and/or capture requirements. If PA works on OS X, even if it's just a proxy, then all those applications can function on OS X too, without having to add CA support to them, one by one.

Most apps that "use" PulseAudio on Linux do so because PulseAudio acts as an ALSA pseudo- or software PCM device. They use the ALSA API just as they would to talk directly to hardware, but their interaction is actually with the PA server, not a hardware device. They don't know the difference, unless they really insist on trying to find out.

The exact same facility exists with CoreAudio, where you have servers like JACK or SoundFlower which can be used by applications that know nothing about JACK or SoundFlower - they just see a normal CoreAudio device (which happens to be software, rather than hardware).

I probably shouldn't guess this, but I'd imagine that the overwhelming majority of all Linux-y applications that have ever interacted with PulseAudio have done so using the ALSA API, not the PA API. All those Phonon-using apps on KDE? They are not using the PA API, but GStreamer which in turn uses the ALSA API, and just gets redirected through PulseAudio (or JACK or ....). Or they are using ALSA directly.

Getting PulseAudio working on OS X won't address or help in the use of those applications.

Do you have a specific list of apps that you know actually use the PulseAudio API, rather than (as (used to be) recommended) the ALSA API via some layer of "middleware" or directly?

In fact I just lied a bit. I'd very much like to make KDEnlive a first-class citizen on OS X, and part of that would be to make it possible that any sound notifications it generates play through a different device than the project audio tracks.

That doesn't have much to do with PulseAudio :)

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References:
	>anyone experience with pulseaudio on here? (From: René J.V. Bertin <email@hidden>)
	>Re: anyone experience with pulseaudio on here? (From: René J.V. Bertin <email@hidden>)
	>Re: anyone experience with pulseaudio on here? (From: Paul Davis <email@hidden>)

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