Pulseaudio sound issues

Posted August 4, 2008
Filed under: Uncategorized |

Pulseaudio, the new sound server introduced in openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu and other newer Linux distos is a great step foward in terms of functionality but sadly as it is reletively new and untested it intreduces some issues:

  • If a sound is playing when you hibernate or suspend it will crash pulseaudio; you won’t get any more sound untill you restart.
  • Any application which uses sound will need to be restarted after you suspend or hibernate.
  • VLC’s sound output is broken.
  • It messes with system sounds.

Unlike Ubuntu openSUSE can correctly cope with flash’s sound output.

To remove all pulseaudio related packages you can use the command (this is probably only worth it if you use suspend/hibernate or VLC):

su -c ‘zypper rm pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-utils pulseaudio-utils libpulse0 libpulse0-32bit libpulse0 alsa-plugins-pulse libflashsupport’

4 comments so far

  1. Alex Railean on August 5, 2008

    I have recently installed OpenSUSE 11 on a laptop [LG LS70] and I have to say that none of the issues you listed apply to my case.

    Yes, in the beginning I did have an adventure with the sound system, but I was able to get it working by following this tutorial’s instructions: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Intel-HDA_sound_problems

    There are several quirks left, but they are not mission critical and I am ready to live with them (the mute button does not work, and I still can’t figure out how to use the internal mic).

    Assuming that I remove pulseaudio, as you suggest, what else must I do to get a system with working sound? Will everything just work or will there be side effects?

    Reply
  2. tomdwright on August 5, 2008

    Everything should just work but it seems for me that the system sounds still don’t. It isn’t worth disabling it if the issues aren’t effecting you.

    To get the mute button working all you need to do is open Keyboard Shortcuts from Control Panel (presuming you are using gnome) and set it’s action to mute.

    Reply
  3. User on December 17, 2008

    Thanks for the info on how to remove the Pulse problem.

    PulseAudio is so a big problem.. and in 11.1 it is installed by default in KDE :(

    PulseAudio should only be used when it is finished and well supported.

    Why do they put a software that make more problems than it should resolve?

    It works every thing better with the alsa mixer for more people than Pulse does.

    Reply
    • tomdwright on December 18, 2008

      Actually there is a patch coming to ubuntu which seems to fix a lot, i suppose it will arrive openSUSE at sometime.

      Reply

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