Re: (tutorial) How to use PulseAudio on NetBSD

[Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 19 Nov 2015, Roy Bixler wrote:
> I dislike pulseaudio for both architectural and performance reasons, so 
> I adopted the option outlined in the above pkgsrc-bugs link and it did 
> allow me to play audio in Firefox 41 without pulseaudio.

This discussion is a bit confusing. Firefox is able to play audio just 
fine on my NetBSD 7.0 box without me running pulseaudio. I'm speaking 
specifically of Flash doing the audio-playing. Since you already seem to 
know what a disappointing experience using Pulseaudio can be, I'm 
wondering why folks are fiddling with it at all? Why not just let Flash 
play via BSD/SUN audio? That works fine on my setup. Do you guys have some 
special requirements?

> Someone pointed me to Jack audio as a good alternative to Pulseaudio,

I'd run Esound (esd), Network Audio Server (NAS), JACK, or even 
aRts/Phonon before I stooped to running Pulseaudio. JACK is pretty geared 
toward folks running a DAW or sequencer, though. It has a lot of fiddly 
options.  IMHO, Esound is the most straightforward, least buggy, and best 
performing out of the bunch. It has the advantage of also being the 
smallest with the least dependencies. Flash isn't going to work with it, 
but if you use esd's "-as" flag it would at least release the sound device 
for Flash to use when esd isn't playing anything. I remember on Linux 
there used to be an LD_PRELOAD wrapper that you could make applications 
that were not Esound aware use the daemon anyhow (including Flash).

If all this is for the sake of Adobe Flash, it might be time to reconsider 
or change directions. Flash is the biggest attack-surface and digital 
disease vector left on the desktop. I've uninstalled it everywhere except 
on a virtual machine I keep resetting back to a snapshot every time I 
browse the net with it (and Flash enabled). I've seen a significant number 
of folks I'd consider "power users" (not devs, but smart savvy users) who 
have been infected with various electronic pathogens by (ostensibly) 
malicious Flash embedded into online ads. I predict Flash will become 
persona-non-grata across the board on desktops and tablets soon, as other 
DRM'd video options are coming into their own, now.

> I see that there is a pkgsrc package for Jack, so maybe I'll explore 
> integrating it into Firefox if I have time.  Or has someone already 
> gotten this to work?

Jack should work, but again, I'm wondering why you want that versus just 
letting it talk to /dev/audio ?

This might be of some interest to you:

http://jackaudio.org/faq/routing_flash.html

-Swift