[Pkg-pulseaudio-devel] Bug#486132: [pulseaudio] Pulseaudio: fails with dmix, idle devices and suspend-on-idle

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
It doesn't look as if pulseaudio would ever be a full-scale replacement
for dmix for me. And it definitely currently is not.
Every now and then, pulseaudio seems to die (e.g. whenever I suspend my
laptop), and some applications don't work right with it (Flash 9, for
example).

> That does not entirely solve the problem. The dmix device will still
> start misbehaving (crackling) if you keep it open long enough.

Actually I havn't experienced that so far.

> PulseAudio on dmix is not (and probably never will be) a supported
> configuration. Upstream has made this clear on several occasions.

WONTFIX isn't really a fix.
Appart from that I have the impression that dmix is actually 95%
supported by pulseaudio. As mentioned, removing the suspend-on-idle
module allows pulseaudio to start fine even when I don't have another
application using dmix already, and I can have applications playing back
via pulse and dmix at the same time just fine.

And in particular it shouldn't fail with such an unhelpful error
message. If it would print an error such as "Dmix devices are not
supported", that would be much more acceptable. But it would be a lot
better if it would just actually support dmix devices. Always keep in
mind that they aren't used by default, but the user needs to jump
through some hoops to actually configure dmix.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
-- 
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