pulseaudio, analog sound output, and WHAT?

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 07:58:17 -0700
Matt Graham via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> The firefox developers have basically said, "The microphone on your 
> computer won't work at all unless you use pulseaudio."[0]  I've been 
> trying to avoid pulseaudio for various reasons.[1]  But since 
> Thanksgiving is canceled this year, I'll have to see the family 
> virtually, and why not do that with bigbluebutton.org ?  This led me
> to a twisty maze of unwarranted assumptions and outright stupidity,
> which I will try to summarize below.  TL;DR: pulseaudio hates analog
> audio and making analog audio work properly requires editing config
> files by hand.

For years, I've found pulseaudio to be a mass of invisible mutes. I use
Void Linux, which doesn't compile everything assuming systemd and
pulseaudio. My firefox 83.0 works just fine with no pulseaudio
installed. So does most of my other stuff.

There's a simple executable called apulse that gives pulseaudio
facilities to its argument. For instance:

apulse firefox

The preceding runs firefox with pulseaudio underneath, but that
pulseaudio is invisible to everything else on your system.

By the way, my finding is I can use Jitsi on Chromium to video
conference with families. From what I understand, Widnows people use MS
Edge browser to join the discussion.

 
SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2020 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive