J.A. Magallón wrote:
> I also use two sound cards, one to get sound output to my desktop speakers
> and other to get sound for my home cinema. And the possibility of 'combined'
> or 'simultaneous' output was what convinced me to use pulse, that was
> something I had always looked for.
>
> Perhaps what is needed is a more general setup for pulse. As PCI probing is
> nowadays parallel and can give random order, many times the default of using
> 'the first ALSA device' is not good. Perhaps a default like the 'simultaneous'
> output combining the 'null' sink and all the audio devices found in the box
> is more sensible, so user has audio whatever the PCI ordering gives, and even
> those without any sound device can have a pulse running.
>
> Just my two (€)cents...

Hmmmm. Not a bad idea. That said, I think the real issue with pulse
right now is having to know a little about it to use it effectively.

We've done a lot of testing and integration work for pulse and I think
our support will be a lot better than F8 when it came out (a lot of this
is, in fairness, due to Lennart (main PA dev and Fedora bod) with his
bugfixes, as well as the work of Fred, myself and others). THat said,
there is still the issue of knowning to run pavucontrol, paprefs etc. to
get the most out of it.

Hopefully by the time 2009 comes out there will be better, more
integrated PA supporting apps, like Gnome panel applets, KDE4 plasmoids
(if this is the right use of a plasmoid) etc. etc. which should help to
make PA on linux desktop seamless. Once PA is exposed in a more
transparent way, the default device it uses will be less of an issue for
people with multiple cards.

Your €0.01 change ;)

Col



--

+--------------------------+
|    Colin Guthrie     |
+--------------------------+
| cguthrie(at)mandriva.org |
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+--------------------------+