[Haifux] Pulseaudio: Sounds good in theory

[Eli Billauer]

Hello all,


I've been doing some sound editing lately on my FC12, just to discover 
that there is a new annoyance in town, namely Pulseaudio.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio


I discovered it when Audacity failed to play back files or made choppy 
noises. Other applications also seem to get messed up with this piece of 
I-don't-know-what.


My first instinct is to kick it out of my system, but since Fedora is a 
system for experts (are they going to open a Red Hat University soon?) I 
don't really know how to do that and what consequences I may face. I 
mean, it's not so easy to just shut down. Killing the server makes it 
restart (as a matter of fact, killall -9 pulseaudio has become my 
catch-all solution for audio problems lately). And I haven't even 
figured out how to disable this restart mechanism.


And unfortunately, with all those fancy graphs and fluffy talk about 
generalized everything, I haven't gotten to grasp how the machinery 
ticks. Are there any special files? Domain sockets? What?


Does anyone have insights about this? Is there any reason why this audio 
server could be really useful, except for all the fine words said about 
it? Weren't things OK as they were in the good old times, when audio was 
just /dev/dsp?


But most important of all: Should I give this thing a mighty kick in the 
bottom? And if so, how?


Thanks,

   Eli

-- 
Web: http://www.billauer.co.il