Adventures in Kubuntu: A testimonial

Mark Greenwood fatgerman at ntlworld.com
Wed Dec 9 18:05:02 UTC 2009


On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009 20:14:26 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > I always thought that you were one of us and not one of 'them'. When did
> > you join their circle?
> >
> 
> Please excuse the question, but who are "we" and who are "them"? And
> why am I suddenly hearing Pink Floyd?
> 
> 
> > But seriously, sound was a bit of a hack in Intrepid with KDE4. I would,
> > from time to time, have to kill pulseaudio and start it to get sound
> > working again.
> >
> 
> Sound in Linux has always been a headache. There is much hope that
> PulseAudio will be the final hurdle to decent sound. Alsa is still
> available, as is Jack if you need it.

Oh dear. PulseAudio (much as I am a fan of it) will *never* be the solution for those of us who want professional level low-latency audio. For this the only solution is JACK. And as Ubuntu don't even put Jack in the 'main' repository it's not exactly easy to get it to work properly. 

Pulseaudio is only a layer stuck on top of Alsa that attempts to do the things alsa should really be doing, such as mixing, it's a kludge and the more it grows the less reliable it becomes. Please don't pin everybody's hopes on it becoming a standard. After all, KDE has Phonon, which attempts to do (bits of) the same job, and currently does them somewhat more reliably than recent Pulseaudio versions do. I know this from extensive and painful experience.

Mark



> 
> 
> > At the moment, things are looking good with Jaunty but I rather give
> > Nexenta or rather StormOS a shot and compile KDE there than upgrade to
> > Karmic at the moment.
> >
> 
> Please do, and blog about it on Blogger, that sounds interesting. If
> you get a /. link then I will certainly read about it there. Thanks.
> 
> 
> 




More information about the kubuntu-users mailing list