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

Here you can discuss every aspect of Debian. Note: not for support requests!

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

ALSA
73
65%
PulseAudio
29
26%
Open sound System (OSS)
10
9%
 
Total votes: 112

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Author
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thenhedies23
Posts: 4
Joined: 2012-04-06 13:41
Location: southeast usa

Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#76 Post by thenhedies23 »

At first the default ALSA worked for me but when I brought my THX-grade surround sound set up into my room and tried it i got the "browser-only audio" problem a few others have reported. I don't remember how OSS worked out, but I know pulseaudio is working great with my set-up and I've only configured the mic input.
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/tmp
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Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#77 Post by /tmp »

I went with ALSA as I have never had major problems with it on various machines. Granted, something is always going to act up but PulseAudio just seemed to give me more headaches.
Bookworm | Intel I7-3667U | Apple Macbook Air 5,2 (Mid 2012) (Laptop) | 8 GB RAM | 3rd Gen Intel Core Graphics

VelvetLicks
Posts: 5
Joined: 2013-01-21 20:09

Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#78 Post by VelvetLicks »

I do prefer ALSA because I'm mainly a Jackd user!
I use Debian as basis for my home studio pro. (Do not use Tango Studio wich is Ubuntu based, either Studio64).
Since I use Debian, I use Gnome, just because it's here and works well for what I'm doing with.

I'm planing to replace some of my old computers (for obvious reasons), so I gave a try to Debian Wheezy & Gnome3, easy install from an USB Key, just a little surprise when rebooting... It was impossible without the key... Need to copy and upgrade grub manually to my HD...

Sound work straight out of the box, but Jack needs ALSA... And I need Jack in order to work with Ardour, MuseScore, QSynth, my external sound card, external midis etc.
I do not care about how menus look like, how DockX behaves, it's, from my end user point of view, just a question of taste and feel, and practicing. I remember when OSX came out with its Acqua looking having heard so many people saying OS9 was much more this, much more that...

I just wonder why it is almost impossible to remove PA from Gnome3? Why Gnome3 developers decide to not consider the possibility to let end user to choose which sound manager he needs to customize its system.
It's a system configuration question, Debian comes with PostgreSQL. But it's quite easy to just remove PostgreSQL and install MySQL or anything in place. Same about Apache2, you may remove it and install LightHttpd in just a few clicks with Aptitude or couple simple commands within your shell. More example?
It should absolutly to be the same with ALSA, OSS and Pulse Audio. There're no programming issues there. Just a question of Gnome Team's choice!

69% of this forum users vote for ALSA... Why to not consider such a vote as a programming guidelines!

At least make Gnome3 to be able to let us customize our system without such ridiculous "hard coded dependencies"!
I'm going to install Squeeze with XFCE on my new hardware, waiting waiting for the Gnome3 team opens its mind!
Cheers
VelvetLicks

User avatar
Pednick
Posts: 34
Joined: 2012-08-27 01:04

Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#79 Post by Pednick »

Alsa, PulseAudio is garbage and will always be garbage. 8)
"An it harm none, do what thou wilt"

User avatar
shiva
Posts: 24
Joined: 2011-06-29 01:07

Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#80 Post by shiva »

milomak wrote:i experienced pa in its earliest incarnation given i run sid. it wasn't up to the task then.

i would concede that today it is probably much better. but i ask myself the question - why change configurations when my current solution works perfectly?

so even if pa is now fully functional, why would i change from alsa? except for the shorter pa.
I was alsa fan but now already a year I got pulse running perfectly and now I'm for pulse. there is no stilling of sound card like alsa know to do.
I have setup with alsa + pulseaudio where alsa use pulse plugin and use pulseaudio server for playback and recording purposes. Every app work great in this setup and simultaneous sound with exceptional mixing capabilities (for onboard card) in pavucontrol. I also use Jack a lot and it work great with pulse and alsa.
Only reason why I anytime switch in /etc/asound.conf to alsa is when I would really to work some latency important project in linux. Which I'm not doing on this machine this machine have only integrated sound card.
Here is link to my /etc/asound.conf http://pastebin.com/WtjpFXim - it was made by following the steps from page Pulseaudio PerfectSetup - http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar ... rfectSetup

Also there are few more things to do after installing first of all is fixing few minor things in way PulseAudio is set up. You can find right steps here - http://pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-fix-pul ... gnu-linux/

Thats all for now I'm happy with PulseAudio even if I in least few years have always kept uninstalling it - install if application need it. Uninstall if I find the way for app to work with alsa.
Debian Sid, custom 3.9 kernel, xfce 4.10, Mate
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Gentoo Linux running 3.10-rc4 custom Xfce 4.10

kedaha
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Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#81 Post by kedaha »

VelvetLicks wrote:I do prefer ALSA because I'm mainly a Jackd user!
I use Debian as basis for my home studio pro. (Do not use Tango Studio wich is Ubuntu based, either Studio64).
...Since I use Debian, I use Gnome, just because it's here and works well for what I'm doing with.
Sound work straight out of the box, but Jack needs ALSA... And I need Jack in order to work with Ardour, MuseScore, QSynth, my external sound card, external midis etc.
I use jackd with OSS4 and can confirm that it works fine with MuseScore. One would have to look around for an OSS4-compatible external sound card suitable for working with midis. For example, at the present time, I'm only able to input music from a Kawai electronic keyboard to Rosegarden using ALSA and jack.
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bwat47
Posts: 34
Joined: 2013-03-17 22:33
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Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#82 Post by bwat47 »

Definitely pulseaudio, alsa gives me way too much trouble when trying to do simple things like having audio with hdmi out. pulseaudio was one of the best things to happen to desktop linux in a long time, I can't stand using plain alsa/dmix.

TonyVanDam
Posts: 67
Joined: 2013-05-17 19:22

Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#83 Post by TonyVanDam »

ALSA wins my vote. 8)

To be quite honest, OSS sounds better. But ALSA is more usable, especially for MIDI & audio recording.

milomak
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Re: Do you prefer ALSA, PulseAudio or Open Sound System (OSS

#84 Post by milomak »

sometime back i decided to give pulse another try.

have to say it installed fairly simply this time and worked with no fuss.

that said i have to say i am not using it to it's potential and continue to operate like i did when i had also running.
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