[ale] Fedorai and Flash

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, Pete Hardie wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 23:15, Michael B. Trausch<mbt at zest.trausch.us> wrote:
>> Oooh, skipping issues?
>>
>> I've got those, too, with the PA in Karmic.
>
> I have noticed that PA starts to take up a lot of CPU when this happens.
> It's been hard to find anything truly useful - there appear to have
> been similar issues
> since FC5 in all 3 programs.

Yeah... I'm _really_ growing tired of PulseAudio and its many, many 
issues.  For the last several releases of Ubuntu which have incorporated 
it, I have had to fuck ENDLESSLY with my sound configuration to get it to 
work with my sound card and surround-sound speakers.  I got so frustrated 
at one point that I pulled out an old XP disc that I have in a box of 
software I haven't touched in years and put it on my system just to see if 
sound would work out of the box and correctly under it.

As it turned out, the best I could get Windows to do with my setup was 
output stereo sound, even after playing the driver song-and-dance and 
setting all of the settings to analog 5.1 surround.  I'm guessing that 
there is something that must just be damned difficult for everything to 
work right, but even with just plain stereo sound, there are so many 
issues that I begin to wonder if PulseAudio is really worth anything.

I only know that at some point, the software will have been worked on long 
enough that it *has* to start working.  Honestly, though, I hope that it's 
sooner rather than later.  I don't know why distributions have included it 
yet, seeing as it doesn't seem anywhere _close_ to production ready.  I 
currently can't play games or music on my system because of massive 
issues pertaining to sound skips---and every time the sound skips, it 
reverts from the 5.1 setting to stereo (though it doesn't seem to think 
so, and I have to toggle back to stereo before switching back to 5.1 to 
get all my speakers working again, which really isn't worth it, since it 
only works until the next skip---often less than a half second of 
subwoofery goodness...).

 	--- Mike