Fedora 11: PulseAudio experiences?

[AdamW]

Hi, guys. We in QA have been trying to get a feel for the state of PulseAudio for Fedora 11 final release.

Recently two of the most important remaining PA-related bugs - the ones that meant you had to use tsched=0 on a lot of Intel hardware - got fixed. As far as we know this means the main affect-lots-of-people issues are fixed. We want to know of any serious remaining Pulse bugs that we're not yet aware of. So, please discuss

Note this isn't the place for your "I hate Pulse because it changes X" rant: by all means create a new thread for that, though . What we're mostly interested in is "when I install F11 on hardware X, I just don't get any sound" (and if you know the reason why that would be awesome). Please do try and test with a fully updated F11, as several fixes are very recent and wouldn't be in the beta or snapshot.

Thanks a lot!

(P.S.: I already know about the problem with the new gnome volume control app not exposing the ALSA mixer channels.)

[XenoPL]

Latest updates made pulseaudio quite positive experience here (AC97 Realtek codec on i865 board, intel 8x0 driver).
It doesn't fall flat on the face while playing movies, sound is clean and CPU usage low. I've made a test with two movies from local hard drive, one video stream from youtube, shoutcast stream in amarok and frequent system sounds (on desktop switch, windows resize) played all at once for about half an hour. It was all crystal clear with no pa crashes. It was all done on user account not belonging to any pulse group. Yay!
The only thing that causes small hiccups is constant 100% CPU usage.

Yeah, new volume regulator in Gnome is evil maybe that's another reason I'm happy with my KDE desktop.

[sideways]

Adam, would booting the Snap1 LiveCD and running a yum update on the alsa and pulse-audio components from rawhide be sufficient for testing (in particular is the snap1 kernel sufficient)?

(since I haven't got a full install to test from)

[djselbeck]

Hello, I also think that pulseaudio in F11 is a lot better than in F10. It works again on my M-Audio Delta 1010LT card but samplerate conversion only works smooth if I choose the trivial method. I also think that the new volume control in gnome is not very good because I cannot control the volume any longer with volume hotkeys if I have selected an network server als default pa-server. But overall I'm very impressed.

greets

[sideways]

Ok, I booted up F11 Snap1 LiveCD on an Acer Aspire One netbook (Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) Audio Controller) ran 'yum update pulseaudio' then installed vlc from rpmfusion.

On launching vlc to play mp3 audio or mp4 video I get

ALSA lib pulse.c:272:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: Connection refused

But the mp3 and mp4 both play ok with audio, via normal alsa route I assume

Similarly if I try to open PulseAudio Volume Control, I get "Connection Failed: Connection refused"

Removing alsa-plugins-pulseaudio gets rid of the vlc error message and audio works fine. This doesn't seem much of an improvement from F9 and F10 where I also have had to remove the alsa-plugins-pulseaudio package.

(edit: mplayer gives the same error, but it plays the files fine)

(edit2: in slightly better news, mplayer now plays my 1280x720 H264 videos pretty smoothly, which is very cool for a netbook)

[marko]

It seems to work for me but I does seem to use more cpu than I'd expect when nothing sound related is going on.

[sideways]

Ok, fixed the pulseaudio connection error

su -c 'usermod -a -G pulse liveuser'

logout and login, then no more connection errors. (Also works if you add the user to pulse-access group, not sure what the difference is supposed to be, I hope we aren't gonna get deluged with dozens of questions about this post-F11 release)

This looks like a bug to me, shouldn't users be added to the pulse group by default?

Unfortunately the sound quality is crackly and stuttering compared to pure alsa.

edit: to be more accurate, sound is stuttering at start up but settles down after ~10 secs and is then reasonable (and the crackles may have been due to a heavy packagekit task in the background, they've gone now)

edit2: er, it's just decided to stutter non-stop again, cpu usage is < 20%, so it doesn't make sense, ok epic fail, alsa-plugins-pulseaudio goes to the trash, yet again

[XenoPL]

@Sideways 2.6.29.-70 kernel fixed PA for me. What kernel is in the Snap1? BTW, it shouldn't be nessesary to add user to any pulse group.

[sideways]

Unfortunately I haven't got a hard disk install of F11 to test with, that's why I asked if the snap1 livecd with updated pulseaudio would be a good enough test. The kernel is 2.6.29.1-54.fc11.i586, pulseaudio was latest version from rawhide 0.9.15-11.fc11.i586.

The connection errors only appear after updating pulseaudio, if I don't update it connects ok. I'm not sure how useful that info is though

[AdamW]

sideways: yes, unfortunately you'll need a kernel newer than the one in snap1 to get a really good test. You shouldn't need to be in the 'pulse' group for sound to work either. The 'connection refused' error generally means the pulseaudio daemon has crashed or quit working right; if I had to guess I'd say it fell over when you updated the package. You can try killing all pulseaudio processes and then running (as normal user, not root) start-pulseaudio-x11 if you get into that situation.

thanks to everyone else for the feedback, good to hear it's generally going well.

[Jongi]

Using the Fedora 7 rpm from the skype site didn't want to play well with pulseaudio even though I had it selected for all sound options. changed to plughhw and all was well again

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)

[AdamW]

yeah, I've seen a few reports of problems with Skype, it's probably the same thing. Unfortunately, proprietary software with a known-to-be-crappy audio interface layer is not a high priority for Fedora development :\

if we can get all the other issues with Pulse sorted out I might find some time to look into this a bit more closely and figure out if there's some kind of workaround, but for now I don't think it'll be high on anyone's priority list, I'm afraid.

[TarrasQ]

On a clean install and an integrated sound chip (an nForce board) most of my software - mainly games - didn't have sound out of the box. I needed to manually install a few alsa/oss packages.

I'm sorry I can't be more specific. I don't remember anymore what exactly I had to do.

[sideways]

Originally Posted by AdamW

yeah, I've seen a few reports of problems with Skype, it's probably the same thing. Unfortunately, proprietary software with a known-to-be-crappy audio interface layer is not a high priority for Fedora development :\

if we can get all the other issues with Pulse sorted out I might find some time to look into this a bit more closely and figure out if there's some kind of workaround, but for now I don't think it'll be high on anyone's priority list, I'm afraid.

Ah well, skype isn't very popular anyway, I'm sure no one will be bothered.

[sideways]

Just to report that in Fedora 11 Preview LiveCD all seems well with pulseaudio, so fingers crossed for the final release