# Linux Audio ALSA, Pulse, OSS4 or JACK?



## monte84 (Feb 18, 2010)

Which do you use with what distro and why?

I switched to OSS4 because of issues with ALSA / Pulse. Getting digital out just wasnt working for some reason. OSS4 simeple checkbox in ossxmix. I also think OSS4 sounds a bit better as well.  Using Auzentech X-Plosion w/ OPA627 opamp and AKG K-601 cans.


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## Melcar (Feb 18, 2010)

Pulse and Jack are sound servers.  You would still need the actual drivers for you sound chip, which are alsa and oss3/4.

I never had issues with alsa drivers, so I don't see any reason to switch over to oss4.  Used oss4 for a while to try it out, but it did nothing alsa was doing for me already.

I use Pulse on my Ubuntu machines and any other distro that integrates it.  It's pretty neat, and once you configure it for your particular device it works very well.  Some stuff still doesn't work with it, but that's mostly the fault of the software developers not wanting to adapt and change their code to accommodate Pulse.  Pulse does have bugs, but the maintainers are doing a pretty good job at squashing them.

I do remove pulse if I find myself using anything that's not GNOME (KDE in my case).  PA development is very much GNOME centric and most of the support is for that DE.  As such, many older KDE and qt apps. don't really work with it.  Furthermore, the graphical interfaces for PA are gtk (and said interfaces are very useful).  I don't have a problem with running gtk on my KDE desktops, but these interfaces in particular are very buggy under KDE; they either crash or peg my quad at 100% usage every time I launch them.

So, in most cases I use pure alsa, since I'm mostly a KDE guy (unless the distro really buries PA into the DE, like Fedora tends to do) .  When I switch over to GNOME then I use alsa + PA.  When I'm running older machines and minimalistic distros (like Puppy) I just keep the bare essentials necessary for working sound (which usually means plain old alsa).


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## Fox34 (Feb 19, 2010)

Backing up the post above, I always use the ALSA drivers, on Fedora there are simple control panels for the driver and I never have had trouble getting them to work correctly. I say just use your package manager should be simple as a breeze.


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## Clement (Feb 19, 2010)

Pulse has severe quality issues when playing more than one stream on my box. I am not interested in debugging it, as the developer should have done this. I have used ALSA since the very early Redhat days and it has always 'just worked'.


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## sf55 (Mar 2, 2010)

Distro: Heavy modified Xubuntu 9.10
Why: I live in South Africa, international internet is expensive, Ubuntu has official local mirror. 

I voted PA ^_^ but yeah sort of on top of ALSA so ... ALSA all the way! Unfortunately sometimes one is forced to use OSS like for Teamspeak2 or Enemy Territory Wolfenstein, but then I will try to use aoss. At the moment PA consumes too much of my old slow pc's resources, so I try my best to use ALSA natively.


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