Anyone else annoyed by pulseaudio?

Both Fedora (since F8) and Ubuntu (since 8.04) have implemented Pulseaudio as the default sound system. From what I've heard this is supposed to be an improvement because pulseaudio allows two sound sources to play at the same time even if the hardware audio chipset or audio card don't support this.

It is apparently some sort of a layer between the kernel's audio driver and the audio programs.

The thing is, in practice it has been nothing but an annoyance to me, a regression I might add, rather than an improvement. My sound chipset, which is onboard with the Intel chipset, apparently already supported the feature in question natively by using ALSA. Yet pulseaudio sometimes manages to not only break ALSA in that respect, but totally make sound unavailable altogether, depending on what program you use.

At best it is an unstable and buggy system, but in all honesty it seems quite unnecessary, in fact unworthy of inclusion. Even if your audio hardware didn't support playing multiple things at once, which I really have to doubt considering how advanced systems even onboard most motherboards are, it isn't like this feature is of such critical importance to bring in a new and half buggy solution to the table..

What do you think?

I for one have totally removed pulseaudio and am sticking to ALSA.

I see, a potentially good standard in the making that just needs to be adopted before it can provide for optimal stability and experience across a desktop system..

Hm that's kind of a chicken and egg situation, because I could argue that since it is not yet widely adopted it should not be bundled in what is supposed to be a super stable release of Ubuntu, but then if it's not included in popular distros it is less likely to be adopted.

Well it's not a big deal. If anyone else has problems with it I suppose it's safe to recommend removing it, since at least that's fairly easy to do. If ALSA isn't there installing it should on modern systems like Ubuntu/Fedora/openSuSE automatically configure it for sound to be available immediately and directly through ALSA.

Cheers

I had no problems with pulseaudio so far.
not something that can't be handled anyway.
for example I installed BMPx media player (great btw), and noticed some issues and skipping.. etc.
turned out that in BMPx's options, pulseaudio isn't the default (was ALSA IIRC), I changed that and it worked fine.
also I'm not taking advantage of pulseaudio, it's not making a difference for my system. and wasn't annoyed by it.

I never got PulseAudio working in Fedora 8 so I got rid of it. Last night, I spent several hours getting PulseAudio to work without GDM or KDM. From some searching I found out that those do something with HAL to make PulseAudio work.

In /usr/share/PolicyKit/policy/org.freedesktop.hal.device-access.policy change the allow_inactive element under action#org.freedesktop.hal.device-access.sound to true. You might want to do the same for cameras as well while you are there.

I had to do this again when I updated KDE.

Yeah, Pulse does the opposite of 'allowing more than one audio source' for me. Now its completely rendered my audio hardware useless. Why Canonical, why!?

I purchased a Dell 1525n with Ubuntu preinstalled. We (my more knowledgeable buddy and I) updated to 8.04 and I haven't heard a peep from web based video since. We unistalled and reinstalled every available player we could think of and toggle sound preferences from alsa to pulse to auto. Now when I try and play a video I get nothing except a prompt to install missing plug-ins. When I try to use this prompt it informs me the plug-in is already installed.
I am using Firefox 3.0 and downloaded the corresponding flash player. I have also tried the Adobe and Gnash players.

If you have trouble with Flash and sound install libflashsupport, that will also enable Flash to use PulseAudio.