On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 11:14 -0700, Brian Mury wrote: > > On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 14:29 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > > > There seem to be a vast number of sound applications > > > competing for use. > > > > Yes, and that is not a bad thing. There are a lot of car companies > > selling different cars too. Choice is good. Use what you like, don't use > > what you don't like. > > Of course, however the real mess is between esd, OSS, ALSA, ArTS, > Pulseaudio, Jack, ... > > The real question is how does someone who doesn't care a rat's ass how > the sound system operates but just wants to play music and videos, use > Skype or Ekiga, and get his system alerts, know how to configure these > or choose between them, especially as a typical system has several of > them and they don't all play nicely together? > It is clearly a time of growing pains for sound support. I think this is the right question, and the OP was correct to call it a mess when sound does not work on a regular basis. Many of us don't care HOW sound works, as long as it does. We are glad there are competing sound programs, but we don't want them all installed at once in a default Fedora pc, unless somebody makes them work together. I've run into the pulseaudio paradox OP described, and I also have trouble when Firefox tries to launch flash videos and the browser completely crashes. Traced back to competition between sound layers. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
