Some people will always be more interested in solution A or solution B.

Personally, pulse have been a source of problems on all my computers, for the last 4 ubuntu-revisions in a row. So personally, I’m glad people offers me the choice to just remove it when it’s causing problems.

As for using a separate root user on Ubuntu, this is really quite trivial to enable: “sudo passwd root” then specify a password, then you can login to root as much as you like.

From where I sit I would much rather see pulse and jackd as options, with alsa the default.

As it is, the first thing I do on a new install is check for pulse and if found, disable and/or remove it.

I’m sure it’s very nice for people who need what it does and are willing to live with its drawbacks. For me it solves no problem I’m having and causes some I don’t want.

Ryan, as far as I am concerned there are other issues with Ubuntu, not just their use of Pulse Audio. My recommendation if you are having difficulty with your sound using Ubuntu is to ditch the whole distro from your system and instead pick say the latest release of Mepis. Yes I know that this sounds rather radical but trust me it is a lot easier than trying to get your audio working with Pulse if it does not work with your system. Let the other people who love pain solve the issues with Pulse and move on so you can enjoy your Linux experience. Mepis is based upon Debian and DOES NOT USE PULSE AUDIO and to me the most important is it still maintains a traditional Root account that one can log into when you plan on doing several different system admin jobs instead of having to log in with each thing you want to do when using Ubuntu. Also Mepis to me is just as user friendly as Ubuntu is. The only reason Ubuntu is more popular is that it gets more press.

I would never want to give up PulseAudio. It lets me transfer my audio from my laptop to my TV to my bluetooth headset and back again. This is the best feature as far as I’m concerned. You can even stream the audio from one computer to another easily.

Obviously if your sound is not working right, it is a problem that you want solved. But don’t jump to bad, rash advice as in this article. Try to actually solve your problem first, only remove PulseAudio as a last resort! Especially for newbies, who should absolutely not remove the ubuntu-desktop package.

The thing with me is Pulseaudio worked wonderfully for me under 8.10 and 9.04 but whenever I’d play a game like doom 3 or Enemy Territory: Quake Wars the sound would lag about half a second, so I’d fire my gun and hear the fire half a second later. In First Person Shooters sound is very important and I died so much just because I couldn’t hear the enemy till it was too late. But removing Pulseaudio completely fixed it and now my sound doesn’t lag at all, so thank you very much.

For those touting on how Pulseaudio is the future, maybe it is the future but that doesn’t mean the future is now. Pulseaudio seems to work for some and be broken for many. Pulseaudio is a very good and interesting project and maybe I’ll use it in the future but for now ALSA alone without Pulseaudio works perfectly.

For mahesh, “yourfile” is a term to say use any name that means something to you. If I had to do that command, I would have done this:

cp .asound* .asoundbkcopy

One DB

Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions

Deselected or Remove the Pulseaudio Manager

Finally Your asoundrc’s under your Home Directory are still configured for Pulse.

Go to your home directory using the following command

cd ~

cp .asound* yourfilename

rm .asound*

=====================================

WHAT YOU MEAN BY “yourfilename” please make it clear ..im new to ubuntu 8.10

I’ve followed your instructions and so far so good.
Minor mods:

I don’t have any .asound* files in my home dir

I don’t have a 70pulseaudio file

I turned off pulseaudion under System->Preferences->Startup Applications

Maybe these are changes in Ubuntu 9.04

hth

I have a clean install of Jaunty. Running as a Windoze folder, due to my HP computer, which has software (I can’t find to uninstall, have tried several times) which refuses to let GRUB run in the MBR. WUBI lets me run Ubuntu, by changing the Windoze bootloader instead of installing GRUB.

The first few times I installed Hardy, my sound worked. It has not worked since. I have tried Intrepid and, now, Jaunty.

i have no idea how this part works

“Finally Your asoundrc’s under your Home Directory are still configured for Pulse.

Go to your home directory using the following command

cd ~

cp .asound* yourfilename

rm .asound*

One this is done your back to ALSA’s default configuration.”

Seriously, the Ubuntu power user should be using pulse, and the n00b shouldn’t know any better.”

That’s not your choice to make for me or for anybody else. PulseAudio may be the future, but it sure ain’t the present, and having reliable software work in the present (not the future) is what interests me.

If it works for you, fine, that’s great. For me, not only do I not need any features offered by Pulse, I don’t need a broken sound setup--which is what a clean install (not upgrade, thank you very much) resulted in.

Pulse has been off this machine for months now and sound has been flawless. Maybe I’ll try it again in a year or two. Maybe not. The arrogance of those pushing this broken (although technically interesting) package on us because they think they know what’s best has left a bad taste in my mouth.

I am also having the same problem in not getting the sound propery from the day i installed ubuntu 8.10. i have had a look at the replies to this problem and trying to remove pulseaudio from the os. But at the last step one said that i have to go home directory using command or terminal and remove pulse audio but i dont know how to execute that command since i am new to linux. Can anyone guide me to it and how actually the command gets into home directory and removes pulse audio.

Thanks

I couldn’t understand why suddenly my videos were grinding to a halt, skipping and audio was out of sync. I started reading about pulse-audio and thought hmm, maybe I should install pulse-audio and see if it works any better than ALSA. Well as you can guess, after research I discovered that pulse-audio WAS installed and that ALSA had been booted to the wayside.

After removing pulse-audio and going back to ALSA things have been back to normal. I did further research on this, why they decided to switch sound architectures and discovered that at some point in the past it was decided to use pulse-audio. Evidently it was horrid and was eventually changed to ALSA. . . those who do not know history are destined to repeat it

Honestly I do hope pulse-audio gets it together, it seems like a decent architecture from reading the white paper. But it just doesn’t work.