[Alsa-user] Stub for libpulse

[Nicolas George]

Hi.

It seems that the Mozilla people have had the brilliant idea, starting
with Firefox 52, to disable ALSA by default and only support PULSE.
Apparently, they intend to remove the support for raw ALSA completely.

Well, I do not want the PULSE server anywhere near my systems, and I
believe many people here think the same.

Does anyone know of a libpulse stub that provides the basic API but
routes all the calls directly to libasound / ALSA?

I have found this project:
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
but it seems unable to get something as simple as ogg123 working.

Regards,

[Ralf Mardorf]

Post by Nicolas George
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
but it seems unable to get something as simple as ogg123 working.

Worked for me with Firefox 52.0 when at least making a test with
YouTube. Does it work for you with YouTube?

$ pacman -Q apulse-git
apulse-git 0.1.7_13_gf445ae7-1

I can't test ogg at the moment, since I now have Firefox with alsa
enabled installed.

[Nicolas George]

Post by Ralf Mardorf
Worked for me with Firefox 52.0 when at least making a test with
YouTube. Does it work for you with YouTube?
$ pacman -Q apulse-git
apulse-git 0.1.7_13_gf445ae7-1
I can't test ogg at the moment, since I now have Firefox with alsa
enabled installed.

Thanks for the info. I tested with ogg123 because I did not want to
upgrade Firefox before being sure to have a solution. Strangely enough,
it works with Firefox indeed (tested with "Für Elise" from Wikipedia
rather than youtube, but that should not make any difference). Good
news.

Regards,

[Ralf Mardorf]

Post by Nicolas George
Thanks for the info. I tested with ogg123 because I did not want to
upgrade Firefox before being sure to have a solution. Strangely enough,
it works with Firefox indeed (tested with "Für Elise" from Wikipedia
rather than youtube, but that should not make any difference). Good
news.

I thought you already played the ogg with Firefox. Good to hear that it
works for you with at least YouTube, too.

[Ralf Mardorf]

Post by Ralf Mardorf

Post by Nicolas George
Thanks for the info. I tested with ogg123 because I did not want to
upgrade Firefox before being sure to have a solution. Strangely
enough, it works with Firefox indeed (tested with "Für Elise" from
Wikipedia rather than youtube, but that should not make any
difference). Good news.

I thought you already played the ogg with Firefox. Good to hear that it
works for you with at least YouTube, too.

^^^^
Wiki :)

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2017 12:36:46 +0100
Subject: [Alsa-user] Stub for libpulse
Hi.
It seems that the Mozilla people have had the brilliant idea, starting

^^^^^^^^^

with Firefox 52, to disable ALSA by default and only support PULSE.
Apparently, they intend to remove the support for raw ALSA completely.
Well, I do not want the PULSE server anywhere near my systems, and I
believe many people here think the same.
Does anyone know of a libpulse stub that provides the basic API but
routes all the calls directly to libasound / ALSA?
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse
but it seems unable to get something as simple as ogg123 working.
Regards,

With due respect, I think you misspelled "terrible". :-/

Thanks for the pointer to apulse. I'll keep that around.

Have you considered using Firefox-ESR instead of plain Firefox?
Debian 7/Wheezy currently has Firefox-ESR 45.8.0. One nice thing
about ESR is the UI doesn't get scrambled on a weekly basis, so
dialog buttons don't exchange positions on a whim.

Have you considered this might signal it's time to use a
different browser?

<vent>
You're definitely _NOT_ alone in not wanting Pulse. (Also,
please don't get me started on systemd. :-(

In reality, Firefox support for plain ALSA has been buggy for
some time. With the "Firefox Hello" thing they had a year or so
ago and apparently dropped, it simply did not work with a
.asoundrc file if the file's contents were not tremendously
simple and stated in precisely the syntax Firefox wanted. Also,
I have a thin/zero-client setup at home, with .asoundrc tailored
to push sound to the appropriate audio device for each session.
Quite often, Firefox misdirects the sound from my wife's browser
session to my monitor. That and a few other things are raising
my level of unhappiness toward Firefox, approaching the threshold
to look for a different browser.
</vent>

Thanks.