Sound Frustrations

[hceylan]

Hello,

I wanted to share my frustration for sound system on linux.

I have started using linux from the days of RH9. Then the only things we had was a mouse, a keyboard and a monitor.

Since then hardware evolved so drastically, but every time linux kept the pace and starting from behind, caught the proprietary OSs. Now we have flying windows on our desktops, best business development and runtimes, plug&play support for almost anything. And most of the times, we have more devices running then again a proprietary OSs with a vanilla setup.

One thing I am really fed up is, the sound piece. Sound Cards and sound systems were one of the earliest addition to the desktops - hence one of the parts that must be the most stable. There are some amongst us that even never used a computer without a sound card.

Yet, despite all the success, sound still sucks in linux. You need to work hard to get it work right. I do not know and do not want to point fingers on alsa developers or pulse developers, but I do not care to set the volume per application or broadcasting my pc's sound to the server.

"I want a working sound, that's all"

If the available solutions cannot do the job, the fellows in charge (be it RedHat, Suse or Ubuntu ) get together and solve that problem. If they think that they'll spread Linux to be a really competition to Windows, get the basic done, play the sound right? I hate to see installing Fedora on my friends computers and seeing the sound doesn't or partially work.

Anybody else thinks the same way? I would like to hear others opinions...

Regards,
Hasan Ceylan

[stoat]

Hello hceylan,

No "General" support question was asked, so the thread was moved to "Reviews, Rants & Things That Make You Scream". I'm sure you'll get plenty of agreement with your sentiments.

[cksmuck]

I have experienced the same frustrations. Being a musician, i looked forward to using many of the free sound programs available in the repos only to have JACK not work, and find that there is no support to be found in the forums or elsewhere (even the JACK page)! I have posted a few questions in this venue and in Ubuntu's forums, but no one seems to know how to configure JACK in a simple, understandable form. I have tried the newest creative distro, Openartist Linux, and had some MINOR success on a 32bit system, but nothing satisfying.

Now I have home video projects, which also use JACK as the sound base, and the video works but KINO and CINELARRA give me the same error message (No Audio Connection) upon startup.

If someone could configure JACK to just work, maybe there would be no problems using sound apps for mixing, recording, and video production, but until then, I will keep trying.

[Cyberhawk]

I had many problems with sound under linux too
(because I have 2 soundcards installed, one for
the headset and one for music playback on the
stereo system that is in the same room), but since
I installed F12 everything is "just working" for me.

I've tried ubuntu and debian before and none of
them was able to switch between output devices
like Windows (or F12) does, so every application
just used the sound device it liked the most and
sometimes I wasn't even able to choose between
the two (firefox just always played sounds through
the stereo, never through headphones).