PulseAudio: system mode broken

Ever since version 1.1 of PulseAudio was released, remote audio stopped working for me. Basically, the tunnel created by enabling "Detect native remote PulseAudio sinks" in paprefs on the client side immediately crashes the PulseAudio server on the remote host. I reported the issue at Free Desktop bug #49681. The issue still exists in version 2.0, which is what Debian's next stable release is supposed to ship (and in 2.1, available via the experimental repository). This essentially means that I cannot upgrade my hosts to Wheezy without losing my remote speakers. Would anybody knowledgable enough with PulseAudio internals be able to help me track down the cause of this bug?

Killing the console bell on Jaunty?

Every once in a while, rewrites in ALSA drivers or in desktop audio components (GNOME mixer or Gstreamer) result in an impossibility to completely mute the console bell. Until recently, ALSA offered a separate channel to control this. Since Jaunty (kernel 2.6.28, ALSA 1.0.18r3) came out, not anymore. As such, I was wondering how else could I mute the console bell?

Some people on Ubuntu Forum suggested blacklisting the pc-spkr kernel module, but this is entirely the wrong approach, as it completely kills sound output on this laptop's built-in speakers. I don't wanna completely lose sound support, I just wanna get rid of that annoying console bell!

Others recommended setting set bell-style none in /etc/inputrc but that only works for interactive shells. The console bell still rings e.g. whenever rebooting, probably because bash gets called as a non-interactive shell by init scripts. Actually, since Jaunty, restarting the system makes the bell ring not just once, but twice!

Can anyone think of any more permanent way of disabling the console bell in some global system setting?

updated ALSA driver for early PowerPC hardware

Risto Suominen contacted me recently, after seeing my Ubuntu wiki page where I try to document what works and what doesn't using ALSA on PowerPC hardware. He has developed a patch against the snd-powermac driver that mainly support 603, 604 and G3 PowerMac hardware, to implement better support for several old Mac models. He was wondering where he could find testers for his work, so I offered to blog about it here. You can find his diff and patching instructions on his website. You can contact Risto to report on your testing's result using firstname.lastname@gmail.com

Rumor has it...

...that Skype might be willing to port the Linux version of their application to Pulse Audio, as long as they get all the help they need to make this a quick and painless process. Rumor also has it that yours truly will have a visit from a Skype insider tomorrow at 13:00 EET to discuss this issue and, hopefully, be in a position to point the insider to a member of the PulseAudio community willing to guide them through this process. Rumor also has it that volunteers who contact yours truly on time to announce themselves might improve this port's chances of actually happening.

Sound editors that work with Gstreamer or PulseAudio?

Today, I wanted to edit a few MP3 files into suitable ring tones for my phone. The idea seemed simple at first: load up a song, chop off a few bars and loop that as a ring tone.

Nice in theory, except that sound editing software on a free desktop is challenging, at best: most of it was designed back in the days of OSS and GTK 1.2, some wants to use JACK for playback, while the most recent crop indeed supports ALSA but insists upon having exclusive access to the ALSA device.

Dammit! My understanding was that, with Gstreamer and PulseAudio, the free desktop had finally acquired a comprehensive, standardized sound framework, but not many applications seem to support it — or is there something I have missed?

ALSA pitfalls ... and a bounty ... or two

Daniel Jacobowitz writes about problems he's having getting proper ALSA support for his desktop computer. Boy, does that sound familiar!

I myself have three computers that are partially or totally unsupported on ALSA:

• Apple iMac rev.D a.k.a. 333MHz G3 tray-loading iMac.

  Partially supported by snd-powermac, except that some controls are inverted and other controls just plain don't work. Probably something as simple as the wrong offset in the bitmap used to select the control on which to act. Bug filed in the ALSA BTS. No reaction.

  Anyhow, sound support for Apple products is being migrated to snd-aop, which was written from scratch using a modular architecture that enables easily adding support for new sound chips. Nice idea, except that no effort is being put towards supporting pre-G4 products...

  Back when Ubuntu appeared on the Linux scene, Mark Shuttleworth agreed to pay a 500$ bounty to whoever made ALSA work on all PowerMac variants. Nobody took it, as far as I know. Those who are interested in taking on this challenge might wanna check my wiki page for our summary of the ALSA PowerMac situation.

• HP 9000 series model 712.

  Recently supported, thanks to someone on the PA-RISC Linux mailing list having a go at coding it. Never merged by upstream ALSA, though. It's been a while since I gave it a try but, last time, only output worked.

• AMD Geode SCx200.

  There is no snd-scx200 driver at all. Bug filed in the ALSA BTS. The issue of sound support on early Geode products was also mentioned on the Linux kernel mailing list, during the big OSS cleanup discussion so, at least, some people are aware of the issue.

  It so happens that the Geode SC is used in a number of popular embedded boards, such as the Soekris and yet, nobody tried porting the old OSS drivers available on AMD's Geode driver source page. Odd.

As we can see, there's plenty of ALSA support remaining to be coded, ported or cleaned up, and some people are willing to pay for the results. Who's gonna grab it?

ALSA on the old GX1 Geode?

As I'm currently putting the finishing touches to "Project X", one remaining issue is ALSA support on the GX1 core inside the Geode SC2200. I'm just wondering if anybody out there implemented this already? Or perhaps someone would be willing to port AMD's old OSS driver to ALSA?

PS: I am fully aware that AMD considers the SCx200 series as an end-of-line product. However, given the plethora of GX1-based hardware out there, having an ALSA driver for it would still be worth the effort.