[PD-dev] audio apis

[Roman Haefeli]

On Mon, 2013-05-20 at 13:43 -0700, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

> And just curious:
> 7) Does anyone using GNU/Linux system want to use pulse-audio with Pd?
> The main reason would be easy software mixing-- for example, you could
> watch a tutorial on youtube and get sound out of a running instance of
> Pd without doing any configuration whatsoever.  (At least that's what
> Pulse Audio claims-- I haven't used it so much.)

I think I would use pulseaudio most of the time with Pd in normal
working/patching situations, i.e. not for live performances. The one
thing that currently prevents me is the fact that 'pd -pa' takes almost
a half minute to start. Portaudio (just to be clear: this is not related
at all to pulseaudio) seems to scan all kind of audio devices, even on
bluetooth and whatnot. This whole process slows down the start of Pd to
a degree that renders -pa (and thus pulseaudio) useless for me. Let me
also mention that this problem is not Pd specific. Also Audacity suffers
from it. 

If there would be (resp. I'd know of) a way to configure portaudio not
to take so much time or if Pd would natively support pulseaudio, I'd use
pulse with Pd for the reasons you mentioned. 

Roman