On Wed, 2011-11-02 at 15:55 -0500, Peter Laws wrote:
> On 11/02/11 14:07, Calvin Morrison wrote:
> >
> > On 2 November 2011 14:58, Peter Laws <plaws@... <mailto:plaws@...>>
> > wrote:
> 
> >     What is PulseAudio and if I don't need it can I get rid of it?
> 
> 
> >
> > Pulse audio is a current generation sound server for linux. It sits on top
> > of ALSA and has certain features one might like. Do you need it? No, you
> > don't NEED it. it is quite nice when it works though.
> 
> I'm not sure that it does, though.  In KMix, with Pulse Audio selected, I 
> see exactly one slider ("Master") on the Output tab and one slider 
> ("Capture") on the Input tab.
> 
> When I select "HDA Intel", I get 12 slieders on Output, 5 under Input and a 
> tab called Switches that has a bunch of stuff.
> 
> What constitutes "when it works" with Pulse Audio?  I'm thinking that this 
> isn't it.  :-)
> 
> 
Pulseaudio has had some very rough edges but it is maturing nicely.  It
offers very powerful features such as dynamically selecting sound
devices per application, setting volume per application, and even
creative fancy things like automatically muting all other applications
when your soft phone rings and is active.

To get the most out of it, you may want to use pulseaudio's native
tools.  I do not recall the packages or even the correct names (names
such as paman, padevchooser come to mind).  I suppose one could do an
apt-cache search pulseaudio - John