When will we ever have an upgrade with sound that just works ?

[Chris]

2009/7/24 William Case <billlinux at rogers.com>:
> From reading the submitted bugs, google reports and postings here
> PulseAudio often gets blamed for bugs that properly lie elsewhere. On
> the other hand, the PulseAudio maintainers and gnome gui creators do
> themselves no favours by refusing to write manuals that start at the
> ground up for sound newbies who are trying to figure out what is going
> on with their sound system.  How can someone confidently submit a bug
> report with the proper data if they have no idea or have a confused
> concept of what is happening on their machines?

Totally agree with both the points here. I've had a lot of problems
with sound myself and disabling pulseaudio gets it working, however
that doesn't necessarily mean pulse is at fault. In my case I believe
it's the ALSA configuration that is presented to pulse. Bug report
here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499435

In the case of my problem, I could probably fix it if I could
understand how the audio device config files work but there is very
little documentation and the format is quite cryptic, so I've got very
little to go on and have to hope that one day the ALSA guys will get
around to looking at it. Also, it was working in F10 but not F11 so
it's a regression. There's a post in that bug report where it's clear
that a change was made that broke support for my sound card. However
in F10 I still had pulseaudio problems as the audio was very glitchy.
Lennart Poettering was quite helpful providing suggestions, but he
suggested that another driver on my system was likely to be at fault
and I was unable to figure out if that was the case.

Incidentally you do not *need* to remove pulseaudio. You can edit
/etc/pulse/client.conf, add a line that says "autospawn = no", then do
"pulseaudio -k". Whilst it may be annoying to have packages installed
that aren't being used, it gets around the dependency issue although I
believe pulseaudio is quite light on dependencies.