Configuring sound output on Lubuntu 14.4

[Aere Greenway]

On 11/18/2014 12:21 PM, Walter Lapchynski wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Leszek Lesner <leszek.lesner at web.de> wrote:
>> If your computers are powerfull enough I would recommend installing the
>> package
>> pulseaudio
>> and
>> pavucontrol
> I do not recommend this. People will disagree with me, but pulse is a
> bloated and unnecessary. It adds extra layers on top of ALSA that have
> no real value. This is inconsistent with the goals of Lubuntu. If
> you're doing music production, I'd simply suggest JACK. But for just
> having sound for browsers and such ALSA is good enough. This is
> especially true for Marc as I know he's dealing with older machines.
>
> There was much discussion in the past about having a GUI for sound control:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/lubuntu-brainstorming/+spec/sound-mixer
>
> I think we need to revisit this discussion, personally.
Walter, and All:

Working with MIDI Music applications, I start (on Lubuntu) by installing 
pulseaudio and pavucontrol.

Part of the reason I do this, is the Java Sound (Gervill) Synthesizer 
assumes if the distribution is an Ubuntu variant, PulseAudio is the 
sound system to use.

Pavucontrol lets me specify which (of the often multiple sound cards) is 
the one connected to my amplifier.  I have successfully used a USB audio 
device with pulseaudio and pavucontrol.

I also use JACK (qjackctl), which is extremely useful.  But beware, 
PulseAudio and JACK are like 'mortal enemies'.  Trying to use both at 
the same time used to hang your system to where your only solution was 
to turn the power off.  Fortunately, newer system levels have sorted 
things out to where the system doesn't hang, but you can't use JACK and 
PulseAudio at the same time.

Well, actually, there is a way to do it.  By manually making 
configuration changes it can be done (a person on this e-mail list 
showed me how).  But as with so many things done by manually editing 
configuration files, it went away with the next system level, and I 
forgot how to do it, so I just live with not using JACK and PulseAudio 
at the same time.

Also beware that sound from the web-browser doesn't coexist with JACK.

-- 
Sincerely,
Aere