[Sugar-devel] Sound levels and pulseaudio fallout

[pgf at laptop.org]

martin wrote:
 > (written as part of the brussels test session)
 > 
 > One thing consistent across the machines we're testing with Soas is
 > that many (most?) of them get very low sound levels. This is an issue
 > with Fedora and Pulseaudio.
 > 
 > The fedora devel list is aflame with discussion about this, and it
 > appears that -- beyond the flaming -- the problem is real, and not
 > easy to solve (meaning it won't be solved in F11). There's an
 > excellent article on the topic @ http://lwn.net/Articles/330684/
 > 
 > It looks like Fedora (for this release) will recommend people to use
 > alsamixer (and a revived oldstyle gnome-mixer) as a workaround. I'm
 > not sure if there's a scripted way to get the "other" channels pumped
 > up to their max levels properly -- and if you do it blindly, it seems
 > that you might overshoot the mark and saturate.
 > 
 > Thought I'd flag it as it's quite likely to hit many Soas users. (On
 > known hw such as the XO it's easier to rig it).

low-end hardware like the XO has no business running pulse.  last
i looked, simply playing an uncompressed audio stream
(admittedly, it was probably sourced remotely, but that's not
uncommon) caused pulse to consume about 10% of a 1.6Ghz atom. 

now, it's somewhat possible that my system was misconfigured --
perhaps someone should double check me on this.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org