Happiness. I can now reveal that I was stupid and left my iPad in the bus from Toledo to Madrid two weeks ago (on a Saturday). I followed it in Find My and saw that it returned to Toledo and stayed there. I went there the following day, but of course the ticket office wasn’t open on Sundays and even if I saw it was some metres away I couldn’t get it... I eventually got a reply from #Alsa that they do have it there and I can fetch it on a weekday so here I am now and yes I got it back. Whew.
Does anyone know a good guide to writing/debugging #Alsa UCM profiles? With Linux 6.8-rc6 the audio stack on my #Pinephone always prefers a (non-existent) headset. If I just want to play audio switching output manually is easy enough, but callaudiod setting the wrong input & output when a call starts is a real problem. #MobileLinux
The speaker just said: "...Mediatek heled us (NXP), because until then we were the only ones using ARM, and when they jumped in we could discuss ARM-specific problems with them."
This is what a healthy open source.project.looks like 👍
I learnt something important about Linux audio last night.
I noticed that I had no sound in X-Plane 12 (a flight simulator) while also being in a Discord call in Firefox. Apparently, certain FMOD applications check if PulseAudio is installed and fall back to ALSA if it isn't. Now, I have PipeWire installed to fix the mess that is Linux audio once and for all. So TECHNICALLY PulseAudio is not installed. And that's exactly what X-Plane detected, which then tried to gain complete control over the sound hardware through ALSA, which it couldn't.
The "fix" was to symlink /bin/pulseaudio to /bin/true to make it look like PulseAudio is available which tricked X-Plane into going through PulseAudio (and therefore through PipeWire) instead.
That was one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered.
How is it after so many years #Linux still manages to totally fuck up the most basic and common use of #Bluetooth (audio)?
Every Bluetooth device I own connects to my Android phone without a hiccup. Every Bluetooth device I've tried (a subset of the first group) works without a hitch on the Windows machine at work.
But my main Linux box at home? About half of them don't work.
It should be a fucking embarrassment, but it seems the F/OSS crowd doesn't "grok" shame.
#Bluetooth is a fiendishly complicated protocol. I've used it on-and-off since about 2008 or so. #Android uses a completely different stack to desktop Linux. Things may be better on Windows, but there were as many as 3 different BT stacks for Windows (Toshiba, Widcomm, Microsoft).
Early attempts used an #ALSA kernel driver for Bluetooth… worked, but 8kHz mono is not the way I like to listen to music. And I'd imagine, unless your choice of music is 1930s swing, probably not yours either.
BlueZ (the standard Bluetooth stack on most Linux systems) pivoted across to doing it in user-space using PulseAudio. That worked okay for A2DP one-way audio, but for full-duplex audio, it is limiting. Notably, I found I couldn't get mSBC CODEC working, so full-duplex audio was 8kHz not 16kHz.
Most of the effort is going into linking #BlueZ and #pipewire, which I think will be the #PulseAudio successor (and may also displace #JACK.. as it has features of both systems).
Pipewire was written to do video actually (webcams), but then evolved to do audio too out of necessity. It's experimental, but I find works more reliably with Bluetooth. (And plays nicer with sound cards than JACK.)
Whenever I see comments like this about #Wayland I always have to ask, who do you think would be developing this new protocol? Every single #Linux graphics developers agrees that Wayland is where we're going, the problem is nobody agrees on how it should look
In my first thread about Linux desktop usage, I didn't talk about audio. I wanted to focus on how let down a lot of the blind people using it, or those who've at least tried it felt.
But now, it is time to express myself once again, this time about the audio subsystem of Linux and how it is making it unbeliveably hard to us to use the system, even without a GUI. For those of you that went through my first thread, this was the tiny reference about needing to be a power user to use Linux, the moment you're blind. I will not focus on other disabilities here as I don't suffer from them myself. If other folks do, feel free to comment on how it might be for you! #alsa#blind#linux#pipewire#pulseaudio