[conspire] Good page about debugging Linux audio problems

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> Had a hardware "upgrade" recently.  Most of the new
> sound hardware doesn't do hardware mixing, which
> means that you have to either (1) carefully configure
> your applications so that only one tries to open the
> device at a time, or (2) come down on the "Lennart
> Poettering is NOT the Antichrist" side of the debate
> and turn PulseAudio back on.
> 
> (PulseAudio runs fine on my pretty much stock Debian
> laptop.)

Succinctly put.

I will say on its behalf that, unlike many recent desktop Linux
innovations, PulseAudio doesn't suffer the Dependency Tree from Hell,
and it doesn't operate at a _grossly_ inappropriate system level, only a
slightly inappropriate one (running as a userspace service, whereas
sound drivers really ought to be in the kernel).

The downside, as I understand it, was aptly described by this
commentator:

  Do I really need to buy a Intel Nehalem Core i7 to listen to a 
  poor .ogg file?  Really?  I know, I only have a Sempron 3100+, 
  but, damn!!  Before Pulseaudio, everything was working so well!

http://blog.mrtomlinux.org/index.php?post/Pulseaudio-CPU-nightmare