PulseAudio

Yep, if we keep this up, it could even become a habit! PulseAudio 1.1 is out. It’s mostly a bunch of bug fixes on top of 1.0. Most important of these are fixes for: a libpulse dependency on libsamplerate (if enabled) which would make our LGPL ... [More] license invalid, broken Skype audio capture (because we changed from a 3 number version to 2 numbers), broken startup without a DBus session bus running, and not going crazy on USB disconnects. This should be a very safe upgrade, so grab it while it’s hot! [Less]

Just a quick note to say that I've just pushed PulseAudio 1.1 out the door. Get it while it's hot! This release fixes a couple issues people had with our two-point version number change and several other bits and bobs. On it's way to Mageia Cauldron ... [More] now and I should get around to backporting this sometime very soon for mga1 now that backports are open Share and Enjoy: [Less]

pulseaudio: PulseAudio 1.1 just released as a stable update to 1.0. Get it while it's hot! (by Colin)

I’ve just pushed a bunch of patches by Pierre-Louis Bossart that can have a pretty decent CPU/power impact. These introduce the concept of an “alternate sample rate”. Currently, PulseAudio runs all your devices at a default sample rate, which is set ... [More] to 44.1 kHz on most systems (this can be configured). All streams running at different sample rates are resampled to this sample rate. Pierre’s patches add an alternate sample rate that we try to switch to under certain circumstances if it means that we can save on resampling cost. This would happen if the stream uses exactly the alternate sample rate, or some integral-or-so multiple of it. The default value for the alternate sample rate is 48 kHz. So if you’re playing a movie off a DVD where the audio track is typically a 48 kHz stream, and your card supports it, we switch to 48 kHz and avoid resampling altogether. Similarly, while making voice calls, common sample rates are 8, 16, and 32 kHz. These can be resampled to 48 kHz much faster than to 44.1 kHz. Now for the big caveat — this won’t work if there’s any other stream connected to your sink/source. So if your music player is playing (or even paused) when you get that voip call, we can’t update the rate. This situation can probably be improved by at least allowing corked streams have their sample rate change (so having some random stream connected but not playing — I’m looking at you, Flash! — won’t block rate updates altogether). Hopefully we’ll get this fixed before this feature is released in PulseAudio 2.0. Thanks to Pierre for all his work on this, and to my company, Collabora, for giving me some time for upstream work! [Less]

Prague is an interesting place to be at this time of the year — next week it’s playing host to the Real Time Linux Workshop. The week after that, we have the Kernel Summit, GStreamer Conference, Embedded Linux Conference Europe and LinuxCon Europe. ... [More] I’m going to be at the last 3, and there’s some great audio stuff happening! On the evening of Oct 23rd, we’re having an Audio BoF to discuss pending issues that cut across the stack — ALSA, PulseAudio, GStreamer and any other similar bits that people have complaints about. Then there’s GstConf, where there are going to be a bunch of awesome talks. Also included is a talk by yours truly about recent developments in the PulseAudio world. At some point during that week, possibly Oct 26th morning, plans are afoot to have an ALSA BoF to discuss the state and future of the HDA driver. There are also rumours of excellent beer that will need to be scrupulously verified. ;) It’s going to be a pretty exciting week! [Less]

If you take Ubuntu Brainstorm’s word for it, one of the more popular wishes for Ubuntu, is to avoid having to adjust the volume slider up and down as you plug and unplug your headphones, but instead keep separate volumes stored for both. Long story ... [More] short, it’s a desirable feature, and we’re moving in that direction, but slowly, as the feature is more complex than it seems like at first glance. The good news: in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10), this is actually working. The bad news: it isn’t working for everyone. For external stuff, mainly USB and Bluetooth devices, this has been working for a quite a few releases now (although you might have to manually switch to your new card when you plug it in). So let’s restrict the discussion to internal sound cards, that on a typical laptop would control your internal speaker and your 3.5mm headphone jack. Here’s where Oneiric will make a positive difference for many of you (although, still far from all of you). PulseAudio has the concept of “ports” (in your Gnome “Sound settings”, this is what’s labeled a “Connector”), and headphones and speakers would be different ports of the same card. As of Oneiric, every port has its volume stored independently, so when you switch ports, the volume will automatically change. Now, this does not become really useful until this port can automatically switch back and forth when you plug and unplug your headphones. This feature is also now implemented in Oneiric, as you can read about in my previous blog post, PulseAudio with jack detection. Things are not always that easy. Not everyone has just internal speakers and headphones, some have line outs instead, or all three. On the input side, some have internal mics, microphone jacks (often more than one), line ins, or any combination of those. In addition, people are different: some want headphones to automatically mute line outs, others don’t. That’s a typical case where different drivers expose very different behaviour: some do, some don’t, some have a setting you can control in alsamixer. Some drivers enable the user to have different volumes for different outputs, others don’t. Drivers label volume controls and jacks differently. Not every driver actually exposes the current jack sense state to userspace, either. The bottom line: Is this working for you? Great! Is it not? You’re not alone. I’ll try to fix some of that up for Ubuntu 12.04, but there will – no doubt – be users who won’t have this functionality for a long time. At this point, the best you can do is to file a bug using the “ubuntu-bug audio” command, and hope for the best. Even if it might be too late for your hardware to be supported in 11.10, filing the bug sooner rather than later might help to get it into 12.04. However, manpower is always an issue, so even better would be if you could write a kernel patch yourself to fix it. [Less]

As Colin Guthrie reports, PulseAudio 1.0 is now out the door! There’s a lot of new things in the release, and we should be getting a much more regular release schedule going. Head over to the full release notes for more details. A lot of people have ... [More] contributed to this release and thanks to them all. Special props to Colin all the patch-herding, tireless help, and code ninjutsu! p.s.: Gentoo packages are already available, of course. :) [Less]

PulseAudio 1.0 is out now. It's awesome. Get it while it is hot! I'd like to thank Colin Guthrie and Arun Raghavan (and all the others involved) for getting this release out of the door!

pulseaudio: Want Twitter and more? Check out Planet PulseAudio: http://t.co/dJVa8RHp (by Colin)

It is with great pride that I announce PulseAudio 1.0! It's been a long time coming and I'm very glad this is finally out of the door and I look forward to a much more streamlined release process in the future. There are too many people to thank but ... [More] in particular I'd like to thank Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen, David Henningsson, Maarten Bosmans, Daniel Mack, Jason Newton, Jyri Sarha, Lu Guanqun, Luiz Augusto von Dentz, Marc-André Lureau, Pierre-Louis Bossart, Siarhei Siamashka and of course Lennart Poettering. There is more info over on the announce mail, so give it a read and also see our release notes. Obviously there is still a huge amount to be done, both in the daemon itself, improving documentation and improving integration into the desktop environment itself. Any help is gratefully received! So stay tuned for future improvements! And speaking of staying tuned, I'd also like to announce Planet PulseAudio. This is an aggregated feed of posts about PulseAudio. If you have a blog and write about PA, please get in touch and we can add your feed. The design is heavily borrowed from Planet GNOME so it should be familiar for some readers. Packages are already available for Mageia Cauldron and backports for Mageia 1 will be available sometime soon. Hopefully someone will update the packages in Mandriva as I'm not actively doing stuff over there these days. Happy listening! PS I'm sure there will be a brown bag moment to come with a 1.0 release, but fingers crossed.... :p Share and Enjoy: [Less]