ESD/GNOME via PulseAudio was easy to figure out: just make sure your login/logout/etc. sounds are no bigger than 1 MiB, not 1MB as some claim. You could use “pactl upload-sample ” to test and make sure PulseAudio’d like the sound.
That was easy enough to figure out. Then Skype came along and showed me the weaknesses of PulseAudio and its padsp script.
The issue was that Skype’s sounds would be very choppy, and my voice would be difficult to understand. I knew that PulseAudio had a way of building up a cache of audio before playing it, and that it would auto-adjust, but I figured that that was messing it up somehow. How I would fix an automatically-adjusted system I knew not. Continue reading →
(Aren’t acronyms alliterations cool!?)
I just installed PulseAudio using a few well-written pages (as is usual in the Gentoo world). Within minutes I was able to set up a stable system with very little tweaking. My favorite features are:
- Individual application volume control
- Everything works together. Now I can use TeamSpeak, listen to music, and play a game all at the same time.
- Easier configuration: pretty much everything is GUI-based (except for the configuration files which you really only need to touch once), so you don’t have to dig into alsamixer or other applications to tweak audio.
Ubuntu 8.04 includes it by default, so just install it and you have the basics. Some GUI tools are not pre-installed, but are available by request.
My Humble Corner 