[ubuntu-studio-devel] Ubuntu Studio and Pulseaudio

[Len Ovens]

On Sat, 12 Dec 2015, brian at linuxsynths.com wrote:

> although pulseaudio wasn't causing the problem I was having with this particular
> instrument, when I run "top" or "htop" in the terminal, pulseaudio is always near
> the top of the list of threads, even though I have never used it.  So I did

Do you have the cpu governor set to performance rather than ondemand? 
pulse is running .7 to 1% here, less than jack and way less than 
zita-ajbridge BTW. firefox is up to 15% and a you tube plugin is pretty 
solid at 12 to 15%, Turning the governor to performance cuts those in 
half.

> uninstall it (remove rather than purge) and things still work fine as far as I
> have seen so far.

Glad you have figured things out.

> Although I don't use pulseaudio and I don't know it very well, I have read from
> many people who use linux for audio production that alsa and jack are the
> preferred systems.

ALSA is the Kernel SW interface for audio, whatever gets used on top. Jack 
is prefered for most audio work, but pulse is prefered for almost 
everything else that uses audio.

> It would be nice if Jack would connect to Firefox automatically; as things are
> right now it doesn't (afaik) without a specific "flash-to-jack" file that I have
> used on another pc but not the current installation. (I don't think it's in the
> ubuntustudio repos either..)   Or maybe there are other, better ways to connect
> Jack to a web browser, I don't know. Perhaps it's the web browsers'
> responsability to allow connection to Jack..?

Pulse is a better way to connect firefox to jack as it turns out. It would 
be nice if the world had chosen jack as the default audio server but they 
didn't, they chose pulse. It isn't just making firefox work with jack, but 
every other package that uses audio for something. There are even some 
applications where pulse is the only way like skype, not a linux choice, 
but often the only thing the other end understands. Also some of the apps 
that do "support" jack, do a really bad job. Audacity is a good example, 
the jack ports are missnamed and also change from one record press to the 
next. It is easier to use audacity with pulse than direct with jack.

Anyway, it seems that at least for some things pulse is needed.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net