[mythtv-users] .23 Sound Issues............Please God shoot me now!!

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

Hi

On 3 June 2010 01:16, Jim Hendry <hendryjh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This way mythfrontend is using ALSA, but other applications without software
> volume control can use pulseaudio.

Note that really, it's one way or the other... E.g. you use ALSA or
you use Pulse not both at the same time.
When pulse runs, while you think your application may be using ALSA,
it's not, it's using pulse... Pulse provides a compatibility layer so
application non pulse aware can still work.

Because pulse doesn't know (nor should it care about) what type of
audio you're going to play, it opens the audio card in a given manner,
and this never change.
The default is to open the card in 16 bits mode, 44.1kHz.

Everything you feed to it then, is downsampled or converted to fit
within those parameters.

(Their resampler is buggy too by the way... With the default pulse
settings, you may experience when you pause or seek in myth, that next
the audio is all static crap. It's not myth ! it's pulse.
Changing the default samplerate to 48kHz fixes the issue (you do that
in the pulse server configuration))

If you were to use ALSA only and let myth do its job, resampling and
audio conversion only occurs if it *HAS* to be done, as such the audio
quality is likely going to be much greater than with pulse.