Any news on skype+pulseaudio+intel_hda_realtek ?

[Dan Chen]

--- On Sun, 2/1/09, Martin Olsson <mnemo at minimum.se> wrote:
> When I upgraded my hardy laptop to
> intrepid I lost audio/mic in Skype:

Your bug report is fairly vague with respect to the actual ALSA mixer control settings (i.e., alsamixer -Dhw:0 ) when Skype is attempted. In the future, that information (use http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh ) should be provided for troubleshooting.

> Recently someone posted a comment with some steps that
> fixed the issue for
> me:

That comment (#10) is by no means a fix. At best, it masks the issue with mixer control element settings being used by PulseAudio. Removing PulseAudio from the picture does not assist in resolving bugs in it any faster.

> PS. I think Lennart is doing a _terrific_ job; I'm hoping
> Ubuntu technical
> board understands the need to be careful about merging new
> stuff to avoid
> regressions. This experience has been quiet painful for me
> and I suspect
> there is other people still out there with PA related
> regressions. DS.

These growing pains are by no means unique to Ubuntu. Every distro that has adopted PulseAudio as its primary backend faces them in some fashion.

> I think it would be a good idea to address this situation
> for Jaunty by
> making sure that people who lost audio/mic in
> hardy->intrepid upgrade will
> get it back automatically when upgrading to jaunty.

Yes, yes, it's all nice and dandy to imagine a magic wand to wave and have someone else do the fixing for you, but the problems are a lot more involved than "people who lost audio/mic in hardy->intrepid".

There are various presentations on the awkwardness of current Linux audio, but none of them quite do justice to how much effort is required to *troubleshoot* which parts in the audio stack are to blame. Your simple phrasing of "lost audio/mic in hardy->intrepid" has numerous culprits; you (generally, of course, not just your case) could be discussing a codec regression, a mixer element misconfiguration, a race condition in the grabbing of hw:* by any number of applications not configured to use PA, a broken user alsa-lib configuration, ..., the list is mind-boggling. A fix to any or multiple parts of the stack potentially regresses usage for others.

How can you help? Test the jaunty daily-live images for Ubuntu and Kubuntu for starters.

> This is sort of old news, so has there been any progress on
> this already
> maybe?

We attempt to fix bugs as they appear. Sometimes troubleshooting takes longer when a lower signal to noise ratio is in the bug report. Of course, many of us owning the audio bugs work on them in our spare time, so your assistance is always welcome. Be part of the solution.

> Disclaimer: Yes, Skype is proprietary and that sucks; but
> due to strong
> network effects FLOSS is going to have to find a way to
> deal with this app

And the best way of dealing is to gently recommend to the Skype developers that PulseAudio is a much higher priority than it is.

Thanks,