Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS)?

[kedaha]

Any comments would be appreciated including what kind of audio setup you have: onboard, PCI soundcard, an external sound card, 5.1 or even 7.1 surround sound speakers, headphones, microphones and webcam audio etc and any issues with these which may have inclined you, for example, to prefer PulseAudio to ALSA or vice versa or OSS to ALSA rather than PulseAudio. Thanks.

[ivanovnegro]

I voted for Alsa but have to say it is the default under Squeeze and it just serves me perfectly but could not really say if I prefer it, I have just no need to use Pulse, also it was buggy in the past.

I have an onboard Intel sound card that works perfectly under Debian without any issues on my laptop that is connected to external speakers. Sometimes I use headphones to watch movies if it is late and do not want to bother my better half. Also works without issues. I have an integrated mic that also works perfectly.

[eric1959]

Alsa, works. Speakers : 2.1

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lspci | grep -i audio

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
. Onboard.
Webcam : Logitech Webcam C500, no issues.

Only problem : speakers not auto-muted when I plugin headphone....viewtopic.php?f=6&t=57796

[Dan158]

I use ALSA on Wheezy. I was running stable with Pulse but when stable was upgrded to using DECnet it messed up my audio. My browser would play sounds just fine but my computer didn't have any idea where my audio-ware was. I could watch a youtube clip in Iceweasel and hear it but if I DL'ed it the sound wouldn't play. I was migrating to Wheezy so I just stuck with it the default alsa, (DECnet got installed in testing too, but it didn't break my audio). While it worked I found Pulse a little bit better for my amiturish playing around but I never got MIDI working, (my ineptitude, not Pulse's fault).

[theluli]

Hi

l would like to ask you about sound , l just installed debian squeez and there is no sound ?

[ivanovnegro]

^ Then it would be better you ask in the appropriate section and please with more details on your install.

[demosthenese]

Alsa works in most cases, but I switched to pulse in order to hot plug bluetooth speakers with my laptop and not have to restart my music player or web browser to switch the sound to the default device.

The downside was no sound under wine but that was fixed with wine 1.3.

[kedaha]

Thanks to everyone for their replies.
I have always taken ALSA for granted and have been content with it so I couldn't say whether I preferred ALSA to PulseAudio because I'd never tried the latter until now.
Recently I tried to help a new forum member to solve a problem with an Audigy2 - SB Audigy 4 in this - to date - unsolved topic, and this prompted me to try and enable my CA0106 Soundblaster Model: SB0570. It had been lying unused in a drawer for several years and previous attempts to make it work had failed miserably, so much so that I once nearly threw it away in a fit of pique and thinking it must be defective. I also have a Creative Inspire A500, 5.1 surround sound speakers so this was a bit disappointing and I made do, first with onboard, and later with a Genius 5.1 PCI sound card. Although I once managed to get rather poor qualtity sound from the SB card through 2.1 speakers my Soundblaster fell, to coin an oxymoron, "deafeningly silent." So, having read the other post, I decided to install Wheezy to a vacant partition (with the 3.0.0-1-amd64 kernel) with the pci SB card inserted and onboard disabled in the BIOS. The Soundblaster sprang to life producing much better sound than I had ever got from the other devices but I have been unable, so far, to configure surround sound from all 5 speakers in addition to the woofer: at best I could get sound from only 3 or 4. So I decided to try this forum How-to: Pulseaudio which has resulted in excellent 5.1 surround sound through all speakers. I found it was very easy to configure the card using PulseAudio and the results are...well...awesome. I suppose the Audigy2 - SB Audigy 4 is even better.
I can also now confirm that this particular card works perfectly in Stable with the default kernel, but I'll post about that in another topic.
To conclude, in answer to my own question, I gave a vote of thanks to PulseAudio because it solved the 5.1 speaker system issue although I'll have another go at configuring the .asoundrc file to get all speakers working properly with ALSA in Squeeze.

[Ibidem]

OSS3 or OSS4?
The two are worlds apart.
I use OSS4 with Debian; when I installed, I could use OSS4 with Debian packages or build my own ALSA (the Azalia I have isn't supported in the Squeeze alsa).
When I updated to kernel 3.0, I had to build OSS4 from scratch; I enabled the high precision audio, and it sounds really good.
Azalia audio on an X100e; I think it's dual channel, but may be wrong.

[kedaha]

@ ibidem
I'm trying OSS4 in Stable and found it easy to install and configure having consulted this forum Howto. I agree with you that it sounds really good - excellent in fact. I got it to work with most applications including flash which worked only after installing libasound2-plugins not flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound which no longer seems available. The only thing I haven't been able to enable yet is 5.1 surround sound but I'll also try it on my laptop.

[vbrummond]

I wish I could try OSS4. I set it up and everything is working, including sound actually playing.. But I can not hear anything. Apparently it doesn't support my laptop's sound card (some crappy via thing). I know the sound is playing because when I hit play in Rhythmbox I see the volume meters jump to the music.

[kedaha]

I wish I could try OSS4. I set it up and everything is working, including sound actually playing.. But I can not hear anything. Apparently it doesn't support my laptop's sound card (some crappy via thing). I know the sound is playing because when I hit play in Rhythmbox I see the volume meters jump to the music.

What sound card is that?
I confirm that OSS4 works on my laptop (Stable+Backports and kernel), but had no sound until I upgraded the packages concerned to versions from sid (with the necessary pinning in place).

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# lspci | grep -i audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

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# cat /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 200

I also installed the minitube v 1.5 from sid while I was about it.
Result is very good on both the desktop and the laptop.

[marky611]

Alsa because it has the most configuration options.

[qjqqyy]

Alsa, pa or Oss is not a matter of preference, since alsa works perfectly and i had a bad experience of pa previously in butnut, i just stuck with the "default" alsa.

[xiphias]

I use pulseaudio. alsa is cumbersome if you have more than one sound device, whereas pulseaudio allows you to switch and change which app uses what sound device on the fly. I'm surprised at people saying it's buggy, maybe I only switched after most of issues were sorted.