[Vm-dev] re: Mac OS Cocoa MIDI Plugin

[tim Rowledge]

> On 17-05-2016, at 11:44 AM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm a bit wary of using it on linux because it claims to be implemented above ALSA and IME ALSA is poor, especially w.r.t. signals. But it looks like a good solution for Mac and Win.

It gets more irritatingly complex; the latest release of Raspbian has added some support for bluetooth sound and apparently this has some great cosmic fight with ALSA that makes a Micheal Bay movie look like a Beatrix Potter story.

Let’s see if I can find a more coherent explanation (warning - I know too little about most of this to really judge ‘coherent’ very well)
From Simon Long @ Pi central - "One thing that has been added to this image is support for Bluetooth, which includes audio output over Bluetooth. Unfortunately, the BlueZ stack does not support audio over ALSA; the only way to get audio out to it is via PulseAudio, and it is impractical for various reasons to move all our audio support across to Pulse. This means that, for the time being, there is a rather kludgey hack implemented (by me, to my eternal shame…) in the LXPanel audio selector which starts PulseAudio when a Bluetooth device is selected (which also breaks ALSA) and then kills PulseAudio when a non-BT device is selected (which then unbreaks ALSA).

This is slightly clunky, but is hidden from the user, and it seems to work with most applications - web browsers, mplayer etc all seem to switch audio to the relevant output by this method.
“
So would pulseaudio save us from all this? I’ll try compiling a Pi vm with support for it sometime, though right now I’m cursing Scratch serial port support for the strange little sensor board. It seems to be ever so happily opening ports, doing nothing with them and closing them. Sigh.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Any Sufficiently Advanced Incompetence Is Indistinguishable From Malice