Re: [PATCH 2/2] gnu: Add espeak.

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> skribis:

> I’m not using pulseaudio; for me it’s just ALSA for regular software +
> JACK for “professional” audio where sync and timing matters.

That’s what I expected.  ;-)

> I’m not very knowledgeable about pulseaudio, unfortunately.  As
> pulseaudio can manage audio streams using various different backends
> from pulseaudio-agnostic software, what really is to be gained by adding
> pulseaudio to the inputs?  AFAIK using pulseaudio directly is not much
> different from using ALSA and configuring pulseaudio to manage this
> stream.

As you note, the main difference is configuration.  For ALSA-lib to use
PulseAudio, one has to drop the relevant ~/.asoundrc, but it seems that
it does not always work properly.

For instance, my ~/.asoundrc reads this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
# FIXME: alsamixer & co. from alsa-utils don't support it.

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

# ctl.!default {
#     type pulse
# }
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

I don’t recall the details of the FIXME and the commented-out part,
though.

For GuixSD I think it would be best if everything would automatically go
through PulseAudio, without the user having to configure obscure things.

Ludo’.