jack and pulse question

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jack and pulse question

Postby LisaD » Mon Mar 23, 2020 11:15 am

Hi everyone,

I've just recently switched to Arch for my Raspberry projects and I've noticed that - generally - packages that have jack and/or pulse as optional dependencies have them enabled (for example xine, ffmpeg). Is there some specific reason for this? I've always run my Raspberries with Alsa only as jack and pulse usually add delays and quality issues to sounds; for example, on a Pi1 with lxde-gtk3 and chromium, full-screen videos play fine when I recompile without jack and pulse but have ~.4 second audio delay with them auto clicker installed.

I don't want to come off as critical of previous decisions, I would just like to know the rationale behind them.
LisaD
 
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Re: jack and pulse question

Postby marty1885 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 3:49 am

I'm may too late to reply but I'll try.

ALSA works well and all. But ALSA is a low level audio interface and the desktop environment have no control over how an application uses the audio interface. You can have multiple audio devices on your system but the application only selects the default while you may want it to send audio to another device. This may not be a issue on the Pi since it only have one audio system. But you'll start facing issues when you plug a external audio card into it.

PulseAudio solves the issue by moving the responsibility of managing outputs. Aking all application to send their audio through PulseAudio. Then PulseAudio exposes configurable options to allow user/DE to change the output device. JACK is basically the same thing but geared towards professionals (musicians, etc...)

The problem you are facing may the the default pulse/JACK config sets a too-high audio buffer size. Which one are you using?
marty1885
 
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