[AD] [ alleg-Bugs-2859274 ] pulseaudio driver needed

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Bugs item #2859274, was opened at 2009-09-15 13:50
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by elias
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Category: Addons
Group: 4.9
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Elias Pschernig (elias)
>Assigned to: Matthew Leverton (konforce)
Summary: pulseaudio driver needed

Initial Comment:
Both Debian and Ubuntu switched to pulseaudio recently. While personally I think that's a very bad idea, it's unlikely to change. When PA is used it takes over alsa (and oss) - but using the fake alsa doesn't work with most applications (see http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup). It also doesn't work very well in A5, even after supporting r/w transfer in addition to mmap.

This means, we need an audio driver which directly talks to PA. The API is very simple luckily, a driver won't be hard to write: http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/pulseaudio/doxygen/simple.html

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>Comment By: Elias Pschernig (elias)
Date: 2009-09-17 12:17

Message:
Nice, that was fast - just when someone in #allegro started writing a PA
driver as well :)

The best we can do about the buffer size is try to find sensible values
and then allow users to override them from the config file... likely
propagate the setting all the way into a slider in your game's settings. We
even could make the buffer size an API call as it affects all sound drivers
from what I see and changing it dynamically would make it easier to choose
a value where both lag and underruns are at an acceptable label.

Also, in the config, we should allow specifying the server address - but
then, probably nobody ever uses the networking capabilities of PA, which
seems to be the only reason to even add PA to Gnome, turning my system with
perfectly working ALSA sound into something with lag and clicking and
crackling and... I'm getting carried away.

I just changed the AUTODETECT behavior of the audio addon to try PA first,
as using ALSA or OSS when PA is running is pretty useless on my system. But
that might not be a good idea in general - if possible we should add a hack
to reverse the detection order when no PA server is running (not sure yet
how to detect it though).

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Comment By: Matthew Leverton (konforce)
Date: 2009-09-17 01:21

Message:
I committed a PulseAudio driver. The buffering parameters still need to be
set to sensible values for it to work well. The default values (i.e.,
passing NULL for the buffer_attr) gave me a 1 second lag. The current
values eliminated the lag, but introduced some popping, especially
noticeable in the ex_stream_seek.

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