TBFKAYIBYNYAAYB

A few minutes ago, I finally released PulseAudio 0.9.7. Changes are numerous, especially internally where the core is now threaded and mostly lock-free. Check the rough list on the milestone page, announcement email. As many of you know we are shipping a pre-release of 0.9.7 in Fedora 8, enabled by default. The final release offers quite a few additions over that prerelease. To show off a couple of nice features, here's a screencast, showing hotplug, simultaneous playback (what Apple calls aggregation) and zeroconfish network support:

Please excuse the typos. Yes, I still use XMMS, don't ask ^[1]. Yes, you need a bit of imagination to fully appreciate a screencast that lacks an audio track -- but demos audio software.

So, what's coming next? Earcandy, timer-based scheduling/"glitch-free" audio, scriptability through Lua, the todo list is huge. My unnoffical, scratchy, partly german TODO list for PulseAudio is available online.

As it appears all relevant distros will now move to PA by default. So, hopefully, PA is coming to a desktop near you pretty soon. -- Oh, you are one of those who still don't see the benefit of a desktop sound server? Then, please reread this too long email of mine, or maybe this ars.technica article.

OTOH, if you happen to like this release, then consider giving me a kudo on ohloh.net, my ego wants a golden 10. ;-)

logo

Footnotes:

[1] Those music players which categorize audio by ID3 tags just don't work for me, because most of my music files are very badly named. However, my directory structure is very well organized, but all those newer players don't care about directory structures as it seems. XMMS doesn't really either, but xmms . does the job from the terminal.

Flameeyes, thank's for hosting this clip.

posted at: 23:10 | path: /projects | permanent link to this entry | 21 comments

Posted by Anders at Wed Oct 31 00:03:33 2007
I have to a with you. XMMS is an excellent music player, I too never got used to all these new fancy players.
It's lean and mean, and I have the exact same situation as you. I have a pretty big music collection, much of it from a time when nobody knew what id3 was - but it's very organized directory-wise.

Posted by Benjamin at Wed Oct 31 00:24:41 2007
Just a small nitpick. I think you should set the "draw-as-radio" property on the GtkCheckMenuItems in the "Move to Stream" submenu. Having checkboxes there gives the wrong impression that multiple streams can be selected.

Posted by Mark at Wed Oct 31 00:29:33 2007
It is funny to see that I'm still using XMMS from time to time, too.
On the ugly side XMMS is still using GTK1. I'm going to try Audacious or Decibel Audio Player ( http://decibel.silent-blade.org/ ).

Posted by Eric Anholt at Wed Oct 31 01:01:34 2007
Man, thanks for pulse-audio. I've started using it at home, and the hotplugging network support is great. The linux drivers for the sound on my linux box for gaming are terrible. So the FreeBSD laptop gets my headset and the gaming machine uses it through PA, and people no longer complain about the tattoo machine running in the background when I talk over Ventrilo. The network loss results in too much skipping for music playback, though, and I'm still trying to get swfdec (alsa consumer) to play back over PA. I may just give it a PA sink.

I used to be an xmms lover. With recent versions of rhythmbox, I can fix my id3 tags the way I always expected I should be able to: select pile of files, change artist field, done. Over time, it's making me happier than xmms used to. Having the player notice new music as I drop it in the directory is nice.

Posted by Justyn at Wed Oct 31 01:28:05 2007
That is one awesome screencast.
And a seriously awesome project, the most exciting desktop development since forever (for myself anyway).

You're an awesome person.

Awesome.

Posted by Tristan at Wed Oct 31 03:37:25 2007
Although I'm a Ubuntu user, PulseAudio will be enough to get me to try Fedora 8. It really does look fantastic.

Just to follow up from what Benjamin said above, would it be possible to make it so that you could select multiple outputs from the right-click menu? Perhaps by setting up an "invisible" virtual device when the user selects this?

Perhaps there are good technical reasons why this isn't possible, but it would be nice to have a bit more flexibility in aggregation than having just one, or all of them.

Posted by Keith at Wed Oct 31 03:41:25 2007
If your directory structure is as well organised as you say, you may be interested in looking into a tool called lltag.

Posted by Taneli at Wed Oct 31 05:02:17 2007
Cool! Thanks for the new release, let's see when it hits debian ...

BTW, the tagger you're looking for might be exfalso, and the accompanying player quodlibet. At least they can automatically tag your music based on the path.

Posted by thp at Wed Oct 31 07:47:36 2007
the current functionality is great, a neat feature would be to make pulse audio "pipe" devices, so we can pipe output through all kinds of streams, including ssh connections?

pa-device-output | ssh server 'pa-device-input'

Posted by Gaute Lindkvist at Wed Oct 31 10:22:05 2007
May I suggest fixing your ID3 tags as a better solution than being stuck with XMMS?

EasyTag is a very effective application for fixing tags based on directory structures, file names and manual intervention.

Posted by Jakub Steiner at Wed Oct 31 11:18:53 2007
Benjamin was faster with the radiobutton suggestion for the move stream context menu, so all I want to say is great work. Things can be unnecessarily complex with multiple soundcards or networked sound, but it is something not so uncommon. Thank you!

Posted by mike at Wed Oct 31 17:32:16 2007
Das ist der Hammer!

Sehr sehr cool!

Posted by Gregg at Wed Oct 31 22:18:24 2007
Watched the screencast, but did not see an ability to play separate different streams through different assigned sound devices at the same time. Is this possible? Will it be possible?

Posted by Rui at Thu Nov 1 19:47:59 2007
Great, great work, as always!

Oh, and great taste for music. Erudite, old school, classical portuguese guitar played by the master Carlos Paredes.

Posted by Mace Moneta at Fri Nov 2 04:06:10 2007
Why not fix the ID3 tags with the id3tag utility (in the id3lib package, included with Fedora)?

I use a small script to correct any ID3 tags based on the directory structure:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" == "" ]
then
echo "Specify directory to process as a parameter"
exit 1
fi

find "$1" -type f | \
awk -F/ '{
artist = $5 ;
album = $6 ;
song = $7 ;
if ( song == "" ) {
song = album ;
album = artist;
} ;
if ( song ~ /.CD./ ) {
song = $8 ;
} ;
if ( album ~ /.CD./ ) {
album = $5 ;
artist = "Various"
} ;
print "id3tag --artist=\""artist"\"","--album=\""album"\"",
"--song=\""song"\"", "\""$0"\"" ;
}' > tagfix
echo "File 'tagfix' created. Check it and execute it with 'sh tagfix'"
exit

Posted by Paul at Fri Nov 2 15:21:14 2007
Pulse audio looks like just what's been needed in linux sound!

Regarding your music collection - have you considered a wee script to assign ID tags to your files based on your (accurate) directory structure?

Never send a man to do a computer's job...

Posted by Lennart at Sat Nov 3 14:03:53 2007
Guys, I want to listen to my music, not retag it.

Posted by Aaron Gate at Mon Nov 5 06:29:40 2007
I'am exited at this new version. I have download, compile and try to run it. Now, I run into a trouble, when excute "pulseaudio", error message appears:

pulseaudio: pulsecore/mutex-posix.c:98: pa_mutex_unlock: Assertion `pthread_mutex_unlock(&m->mutex) == 0' failed.

Could you help me? Thanks!

Posted by Lennart at Mon Nov 5 15:14:18 2007
Aaron: this is not a support forum. Try asking questions like this on the ML or on IRC.

Anyway, you need to upgrade your libtool/libltdl to something ending with .24 at least.

Posted by Gábor Lénárt (LGB) at Mon Nov 5 16:00:35 2007
Well, I don't want to flame here, but this xmms related topic is quite interesting: you don't want to use newer players, you don't want to retag music, etc just listen. However some guys who are against of the PA thing (with reasons like: mixing should be done by hw, and others you've described quite well in your long mail) actually the same: they want to hear music and don't want to mess with another abstraction layer between hw and apps (PA). I mean: I'm with you, PA and your long mail sounds quite reasonable, just I find funny, that your opinion with using xmms and refusing newer players, and using tag support is basically the same thing as others rejects PA, or prefer esd and older solutions :) Like others should consider the usefullnes or newer ideas (forget hw mixing, forget old and buggy esd, etc), you should consider in the world of music players as well. Sorry for my possinle offensive comment, please ignore it if you feel against me. Of course you can use ANY player you like it would not insult others, so sorry again :) And sorry for my poor English.

Anyway the other topic: I'm finding PA quite interesting (especially reading your "long mail" - again), however after installing it, it generates stange noise without any client at all (sometimes it's some kind of white noise, sometimes it's much closer to a disfigured 'beeeeeeeeeep' sound).

Posted by pulsilanima at Fri Apr 30 04:49:34 2010
Sure you are an audio terrorist!

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Tue, 30 Oct 2007

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