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Limitations in 0.3

Last edited by Wim Taymans
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General

  • Emulation libraries need to be tested with a lot of applications. Many application (ab)use API in different ways that all need to be supported..
  • The ALSA plugin is probably quite complete and seems to work with a lot of apps.
  • The JACK library is quite complete. The JACK API is not huge but apps still expect certain implementation details that are not documented well (order of callbacks, thread contexts,...)
  • PulseAudio in general is a big API with many subtle bugs that will need time to perfect. Some things currently work with the pulseaudio API, others don't. Most apps should be able to produce/consume sound.
  • bluetooth is not tested much and might not work very well yet.
  • portaudio apps tend to do bad things (audacity) like opening all devices multiple times in all possible formats and configurations to 'probe' the devices. This is quite expensive.

ALSA

  • no mixer, unclear how it could make sense. since 0.3.8
  • Tested: aplay, vlc, mplayer, sweep, apulse

JACK

  • no session management API implemented, possibly not important/used.
  • internal clients not implemented
  • freewheeling not implemented. Since 0.3.7 there is a dummy driver that could be used to implement this later.
  • latencies not implemented at all yet
  • Tested: ardour5, qjackctl, carla, catia, jack_simple_client, jack-smf-player, xjadeo, qsynth, calfjackhost, ...

Pulseaudio

  • move to sink/source is not implemented since 0.3.7
  • default source/sink is not implemented since 0.3.7
  • volumes are done in software currently, hardware volumes are not touched. since 0.3.7 uses UCM or PulseAudio profile config to implement hardware volume and mute
  • profiles on devices is not implemented since 0.3.7 supported with UCM and PulseAudio profile config
  • time reporting is inaccurate and broken, apps might skip, stutter or hang. better since 0.3.4, firefox youtube works perfect, chrome youtube has trouble,
  • extensions are not implemented
  • Tested: paplay, pavucontrol, vlc, mplayer, firefox, chrome, webrtc, youtube, spotify

Session manager (pipewire-media-session)

  • The default session manager has no configuration options. It performs a hardcoded logic on devices detected by udev. Since 0.3.4 it's however possible to disable some modules.
  • no support for setup or configuration of devices with UCM or otherwise. All ALSA PCM are simply exposed as is. since 0.3.7 using PulseAudio profile config parser
  • No mixer support in any way. since 0.3.7 via PulseAudio config parser
  • No support for the session-manager API, no Endpoints/Streams.

Bluetooth

  • Largely untested.

Flatpak

  • Flatpaks do not work yet because they ship with an original libpulse library that only knows how to connect to a real pulseaudio server. Work is ongoing to start a stripped down pulseaudio to support this use case.