Feature Request/Recommendation/Petition?: Remove PulseAudio!

[_fLuXxY~<3]

Alright guys, I really am very appreciative you guys are thinking about Linux as a platform... In fact it's probably the best thing you ever did. BUT SERIOUSLY PULSEAUDIO!? I'm sorry, but when I do (pre-built) linux installs (ex ubuntu) the first thing I do is remove pulseaudio. If I'm building an Arch linux install (most the time) I don't even bother installing pulseaudio... PulseAudio as constantly been proven to have hardware issues, software issues, configuration issues, high latency (fact: to try the steam linux I've been trying to get pulseaudio to play nice with my current audio setup (jack) and the first time I ran tf2 and fired off a shotgun shell, by the time you saw the bullets hit wall, the sound started playing for the shotgun blast.) And overall just a pain in the butt with rolling-release distros like Linux Mint. After going through a bunch of configuration with pulseaudio and jack, I finally got a low latency build, but then take a guess? I rebooted, and pulseaudio not only now wont detect my headphones built-in sound card, and I can't get it to play nice with jack anymore... All because a simple reboot... PulseAudio is a joke, and while I very much support that you are developing your client for linux, it was a bad move to make games DEPEND on PulseAudio, and as of yet, I've yet to see any otherway to get sound out of your games besides using pulse, and so while I'm extremely happy you've made a client for linux, I'm severly dissapoint you didn't do your research and learn how linux audio works. While pulseaudio maybe on most the distros you were aiming for... You have to realize that pulseaudio is troublesome, and honestly has kind of died off with those who care about their audio. I would have honestly liked to see just strict alsa support (which all distros have) or JACK/JACK2 support... Or at least an option to configure which audio server you use... I hope you at least take that into consideration, and if you have read this thank you.

I would like to also make this a petition if I can, anyone who agrees that Valve should try and work with at least alsa, implement JACK, or at least allow for the option to choose which sound-server you use, please state so here as well.

[matt]

Pulseaudio 3.0 has latency control which makes it on par with ALSA. It's going to ship in 13.04.

[_fLuXxY~<3]

Oprindeligt skrevet af gutigen o) Linux:

Pulseaudio 3.0 has latency control which makes it on par with ALSA. It's going to ship in 13.04.

Doesn't fix the fact that people are having Audio issues out the wazzoo, just because they could have simply rebooted their computer, imagine doing an update and all the sudden, your whole audio setup is scewed thanks to PulseAudio? Can't even get sound to play properly through steam anymore, because it wont detect audio devices properly... Also dude, PulseAudio is just a front-end to ALSA. A way to get multiple things that play sound to plug into ALSA to play on the soundcard properly... But it does a pretty bad job of that if it can't even detect the sound devices as well as ALSA can.

[instabilis]

I remember having a few problems with PulseAudio while using Ubuntu, I'm talking years ago mind you. I've had almost no problems with it since I switched to Fedora.

[[Linux] unbridledExüberance]

I agree that pulseaudio is stupid and also dumb. I tried to make a program using pulseaudio, but there was no decent documentation anywhere, and it completely screwed up when you tried to cork or uncork the audio. It's a mess. ALSA, on the other head, was easy to develop for.

[matt]

Yea well, I still have no mic in Source games while it works everywhere else (skype, ts3 etc). Filed a bug report tho, we'll see. So it may be true :)

[RobbieThe1st [Linux]]

Doesn't Steam just use libOpenAL? I mean I was able to make audio start/stop working by messing with the openAL config file(hopefully at ~/.alsoftrc - a good definition of this file is at http://projects.developer.nokia.com/qt_openal_soft/browser/alsoftrc.sample )
If this is all that Steam uses(which I believe it is), you can just set it to use ALSA, and away you go. I've done this, and it seems to work.

[[Linux] unbridledExüberance]

Oprindeligt skrevet af gutigen o) Linux:

Yea well, I still have no mic in Source games while it works everywhere else (skype, ts3 etc). Filed a bug report tho, we'll see. So it may be true :)

Funny, in Half Life 1, I have a mic working, but no sound.
Unless I switch to ALSA, but then I still have no background music and the voices are sped up to sound like hamsters.

EDIT: Got sound working with pulseaudio. Turns out that Steam just set the volume for Source apps to 0 for some incomprehensible reason.

[johndrinkwater]

If you have a specific issue with steam or Valve game’s default behaviour on your distribution, please file a bug! https://github.com/ValveSoftware/

[BurritoBazooka]

I think a petition is a little out of line. It's convention to just file a feature request and hope for the best. The user still has the choice to use Alsa, don't they?

I set my gstreamer-properties to use Alsa, restarted Steam, and that seems to have gotten rid of the glitchy and delayed sound I was getting in Source (with STEAM_RUNTIME=1). I think there was a bugfix for the glitchiness though.
I'm looking forward to PulseAudio 3.0.

[_fLuXxY~<3]

Oprindeligt skrevet af BurritoBazooka Uses Linux.:

I think a petition is a little out of line. It's convention to just file a feature request and hope for the best. The user still has the choice to use Alsa, don't they?

I set my gstreamer-properties to use Alsa, restarted Steam, and that seems to have gotten rid of the glitchy and delayed sound I was getting in Source (with STEAM_RUNTIME=1). I think there was a bugfix for the glitchiness though.
I'm looking forward to PulseAudio 3.0.

Unfortunately not... or at least nothings that's worked for me, and thanks to me experimenting with pulse... I might be all "frick it and reinstall everything" soon, because playing with all the audio backends has really confused the heck out of my install... Never said I was a linux guru or anything, I just know that pulseaudio has issues. As for PulseAudio 3... Dunno what to think of it... if it proves to be better, I would hope someone posts here about it, but still, it should be at least an OPTION to choose which backend you want to use for the client/games... In the end. I basically have to reinstall my whole system anyway, just to clean things up (linux install from back in 2010) Who knows, all I do know is, I don't know why they didn't make it possible for people too choose their perfered backend... I like JACK, and have been using it forever, because to me it just WORKS... I'll probably wait until pulseaudio 3 get's tossed into the Arch repos to do my install... And JUST FOR YEW STEAM~<3 I'll make a pulseaudio dependant install... But seriously, take my suggestion seriously. Find a way to allow us to choose which backend your games and client stream too... It would be lovely.

(A quick note on the whole "petition" thing: I honestly didn't think asking to remove something was really a recommendation or feature request, as usually those are about adding something, or imroving something, meanwhile I'm asking to remove something, and I figured those working on the steam4linux client would do something as extreme as rework their whole client just for one person, so I figured if enough people agreed, they would see it. I do however apologize to any employee/person who read my initail message and thought me rude by the way I asked others too "Sign here", I guess I was a little miffed, and I'm sorry.)

[Cool Chulainn]

I've been using Linux since 2003 and have never once had a single sound issue on any computer I've used, with any distro (I've used Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse, Gentoo), using OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio.

[BurritoBazooka]

I've had a couple of problems that I can recall. The last one was the glitchy and laggy sound which I already reported and I think was fixed in the runtime.

I think a feature request for the choice between Alsa and Pulseaudio and all the other systems is acceptable... or a request for OpenAL support. I'm uninformed over whether Steam can already do this. I've been seeing parameters like "SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse" (paraphrase) floating around

[toastiety]

Did I teleport to 3 years ago or something?

[_fLuXxY~<3]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Linux Atheisto:

Did I teleport to 3 years ago or something?

Yes?

[toastiety]

Oprindeligt skrevet af *Z义団`~๖ۣۜƒฬนXį~<3:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Linux Atheisto:

Did I teleport to 3 years ago or something?

Yes?

To be more explicit, I think we gave up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about PulseAudio and moved on to whining about Systemd and udev forks.