Public bug reported:
Ubuntu's (Breezy) sound "system" is broken out of the box. After months
of messing with it, I got some semblance of it working by giving up on a
huge bleeding chunk of it.
First problem:
Two sound cards, both purportedly supported by the sound system. One is a
built-in one (whichever one is in the Sony PCG-FRV23 laptop) and one an
external Sound Blaster USB. (A very basic Sound Blaster, not the various
hyped-up jobs.) When both are in the system both work. The system, despite a
bewildering variety of provided tests and workarounds given on the mailing
list, cannot reliably use one over the other, however. Some apps will go to
the preferred sound card (external). Some apps rigidly go to the internal
sound card no matter what is attempted. More confusingly some apps (GAIM being
a major offender in this) will switch randomly between one card and the other
at each invocation. That is to say that I run GAIM, get the internal. I kill
it, get the external. I run it again, get the external again. I run it again,
get the internal. And so on. In each individual session it uses the card it
selected at startup, but each session gives it a randomc ard.
After weeks of messing with this I just gave up and tossed the external
sound card aside and used the bad internal one. This leads to problem
2.
Second problem:
I have to switch between multimedia apps at random for each new multimedia file
(movies especially) that I acquire. There is no automatic downmixing system in
Ubuntu that I can see, so my internal sound card, with no AC3 capabilities,
etc., gets the short end of the stick. Totem/gstreamer is a laugh. It works
on fewer than half of my movies. Totem/xine is better, but still mysteriously
fails on a wide variety of multimedia files (with the bizarre error message
"device busy"). Just xine works on most files, but will occasionally offer no
sound for no observable reason. The general procedure each time I want to play
a movie is: try xine, failing that try xmms, failing that try VLC, failing
that try....
The culprit here seems to be downmixing of audio. In Windows (if I'm
permitted to name that OS on this tool) downmixing audio -- 5.1 to 2.0,
say, or ACS to vanilla stereo -- is done automagically behind the scenes
by the sound system based on what codecs are loaded and what their
capabilities are. Any multimedia application can work on any device
reliably (with, obviously, loss of functionality as downmixing occurs).
This doesn't seem to be the case in Ubunut's various sound systems.
Downmixing seems to be entirely in the realm of the application domain
and thus requires each and every multimedia application to know each and
every possible combination of codecs and paths to build an output stream
matching device capabilities. Most apps are not this carefully
constructed and, as a result, we have the mess that's in place now.
Considering that this problem was solved in Windows 98 (that I can
confirm) and likely as far back as Windows 95 (I no longer have access
to a Windows 95 machine to confirm this), it seems pretty embarrassing
to have a "modern" operating system that's working in the domain of MS-
DOS in such a key user perception area.
** Affects: Ubuntu
Importance: Untriaged
Status: Unconfirmed
--
Sound is a total mess.
https://launchpad.net/bugs/50171
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