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how do I make songbird use alsa?
In Fedora 11 how do I switch songbird to user alsa? I don't see any options anywhere within the program to switch from pulseaudio. Everything else is making noise using alsa. But songbird won't use alsa.
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I've never tried this on linux and my memory's a little fuzzy, but there is an about:config option to specify a particular audio sink for gstreamer to use. IIRC, it's "songbird.mediacore.gstreamer.audiosink". Set it to the name of the desired sink, perhaps "alsasink". You may have to create the pref; I don't think it exists by default. Not sure if this will work, but you could try it.
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Inappropriate?G'day,
Songbird uses gstreamer (and I actually thought by default, it uses alsa), so there might be a way to mess with gstreamer to do it. However, you should be using pulseaudio actually.
Is there any reason why you would want to use ALSA? Contrary to belief, there are very good reasons why Linux is moving to pulseaudio. If you are having problems with Pulseaudio, it would be better to report them directly to Fedora, rather then dumping pulse completely.
Some benefits of pulse include:
1) One sound server to rule them all. Pulseaudio supercedes ARTS, esound, alsa Dmix, etc. And it can implement support for other sound servers via plugins (it even supports phenon)
2) Easier for developers. Alsa is linux only. With Pulseaudio though, developers can support windows, osx and Linux with almost the same code.
3) Pulse is designed to be very flexible, and offers new ways of managing audio.
4) Pulse allows users to choose any backend they want (they can choose OSS or Alsa, and their apps wont care).
5) Longer support of the application.
Pulseaudio is a good thing, I wouldn't stray away from it, unless you are doing professional audio stuff (and I think pulseaudio is designed to allow some pro stuff too).. Just a thought though.. -
Inappropriate?I've never tried this on linux and my memory's a little fuzzy, but there is an about:config option to specify a particular audio sink for gstreamer to use. IIRC, it's "songbird.mediacore.gstreamer.audiosink". Set it to the name of the desired sink, perhaps "alsasink". You may have to create the pref; I don't think it exists by default. Not sure if this will work, but you could try it.
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Inappropriate?I use SPDIF digital out and no matter what I've done I can't get pulseaudio to work. I just upgraded to 11 recently hoping they would have ironed it out. But no such luck. As soon as I switch to alsa and unmute the PCM everything works great. In the past I've used rhythmbox. But it's just doesn't work the way I want it to. Songbird seemed great.
I had used gstreamer-properties to set it to ALSA instead of automatic and that didn't seem to have any effect. I'll try the audiosink as soon as I have a chance and let you know if it worked. -
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Inappropriate?"Is there any reason why you would want to use ALSA? Contrary to belief, there are very good reasons why Linux is moving to pulseaudio. If you are having problems with Pulseaudio, it would be better to report them directly to Fedora, rather then dumping pulse completely."
Yes - I am sick of being told how wonderful Pulse is. And If I ever feel the need to set up an audio server, I'll take another look at it. Unfortunately at the moment it just doesn't work. When I use PulseAudio, I get weird crackling sounds. It does not record from my microphone. It seems to pick an output device at random - is that a sink? There are a million pages of advice on how to set it up correctly - none have worked so far. At the moment it won't play at all. It is a pain.
Also - I just don't get why I cannot get audio on Linux to without having to look up an acronym soup. SPDIF??? My mac has one volume control that works for everything. My windows machine has one volume control that works for everything. My Linux machine has a volume control that sometimes works, and sometimes I need to open a mixer and try Master, Front, PCM, etc to find which volume control works. I need to go an fiddle with the sound configuration every time i want to use audio. drives me crazy.
I’m about to find . puls* |xargs rm
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Inappropriate?I'll be the first to agree that pulseaudio has many problems, however, many problems are actually with the distributions sometimes (like Ubuntu offered a flash version which wasn't compatible). However, in the long term, developers should work under the assumption that pulse is perfect, because like it or loathe it, it is the future way of doing things.
Have you ever filed any bugs for Pulseaudio though? Because, we are all guilty of not submitting our problems, which may be why many aren't getting fixed as quickly as they should. I ultimately gave up on linux though, because I cant get dolby digital live in linux anyway.
CHAMP
