polypaudio -> esound

Matt Zimmerman mdz at ubuntu.com
Wed Mar 9 22:04:10 CST 2005


On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 09:58:13PM -0500, Brian Puccio wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 15:01 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > Due to functionality and supportability issues, Hoary is reverting back to
> > esound from polypaudio.  An automated transition mechanism has not yet been
> > established, so meanwhile, if you have polypaudio installed, we recommend
> > that you install the 'esound' package (which will remove polypaudio and
> > replace it with esound).
> 
> While I do realize that this is a good decision and quite logical given
> the influx of users who had problems when polyaudio was introduced, I
> can't help but wonder, was I the only person who found polyaudio to be
> an improvement?

No, you weren't.  There were definitely improvements in polypaudio, which is
why we tried it out for Hoary, but overall it was not in good enough shape
for the Hoary release.

> I was a loyal warty user, using a bunch of packages from the universe, but
> didn't bother changing anything relating to sound.  I was able to hear all
> sounds (including flash in firefox) and here multiple sounds at once.  A
> while ago, I made the jump to Hoary, knowing full well things may break.
> Sound was one of them.  I got no sound at all, unless I used xine and set
> the output to be ESD in the xine config (gstreamer, flash, etc had no
> audio).  I meant to figure out why, but a few weeks later, polyaudio
> popped up and since then the sound has been fine, just as before.

The flash plugin seems to try to open the sound device directly, so it is
incompatible with esd.  If xine works with esd output, esd is working, and
your problem seems to be with gstreamer.

Perhaps you don't have gstreamer configured to output to esd.  It is
configured to use esd by default, but you can check with
gstreamer-properties.

-- 
 - mdz



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