How can I tell if I'm using alsa or pulse-audio by default? (Switching to i3-wm)
.everyoneloves__top-leaderboard:empty,.everyoneloves__mid-leaderboard:empty,.everyoneloves__bot-mid-leaderboard:empty{ margin-bottom:0;
}
I might not be understanding the core concept, in which case correct me if I'm wrong.
Ubuntu comes with two different audio rendering servers, pulse and alsa. Is Alsa an intermediary layer to pulse? Essentially I need to know which one I'm using.
The reason I need to know is that I am attempting to switch from unity to i3-wm. While setting up i3 I found I had no audio and came upon this thread. It specifies various options for binding my laptop volume up and down keys to their functionality and after I tinkered with a few of the options I got very scratchy audio, which is why (I assume) I need to know which I'm actually using.
sound pulseaudio alsa i3-wm
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
add a comment |
I might not be understanding the core concept, in which case correct me if I'm wrong.
Ubuntu comes with two different audio rendering servers, pulse and alsa. Is Alsa an intermediary layer to pulse? Essentially I need to know which one I'm using.
The reason I need to know is that I am attempting to switch from unity to i3-wm. While setting up i3 I found I had no audio and came upon this thread. It specifies various options for binding my laptop volume up and down keys to their functionality and after I tinkered with a few of the options I got very scratchy audio, which is why (I assume) I need to know which I'm actually using.
sound pulseaudio alsa i3-wm
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
add a comment |
I might not be understanding the core concept, in which case correct me if I'm wrong.
Ubuntu comes with two different audio rendering servers, pulse and alsa. Is Alsa an intermediary layer to pulse? Essentially I need to know which one I'm using.
The reason I need to know is that I am attempting to switch from unity to i3-wm. While setting up i3 I found I had no audio and came upon this thread. It specifies various options for binding my laptop volume up and down keys to their functionality and after I tinkered with a few of the options I got very scratchy audio, which is why (I assume) I need to know which I'm actually using.
sound pulseaudio alsa i3-wm
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
I might not be understanding the core concept, in which case correct me if I'm wrong.
Ubuntu comes with two different audio rendering servers, pulse and alsa. Is Alsa an intermediary layer to pulse? Essentially I need to know which one I'm using.
The reason I need to know is that I am attempting to switch from unity to i3-wm. While setting up i3 I found I had no audio and came upon this thread. It specifies various options for binding my laptop volume up and down keys to their functionality and after I tinkered with a few of the options I got very scratchy audio, which is why (I assume) I need to know which I'm actually using.
sound pulseaudio alsa i3-wm
sound pulseaudio alsa i3-wm
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
edited Jan 1 '17 at 8:59
Eliah Kagan
83.5k22229369
83.5k22229369
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
asked Feb 27 '14 at 11:01
Paul Nelson BakerPaul Nelson Baker
4301511
4301511
add a comment |
add a comment |
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
Ubuntu uses both ALSA, and Pulseaudio for controlling sound input and output.
ALSA
ALSA serves as a kernel based system to connect your sound hardware to the operating system. All sound cards in your system will controlled using drivers and card specific settings. Most of this is done under the hood with no need for users to interfere.
In addition ALSA offers libraries and tools to control our sound system. The tool most of us may have come across may be the alsamixer, a semi-graphical terminal application to control sound volume, and mute state of all cards and profiles in our system.
We can give out sound to our soundcard simply by using ALSA without the need of PulseAudio ore anyother sound server.
Pulse Audio
On top of the ALSA base the PulseAudio sound server provides further tools to better control our sound system. This is done with modules to define volume levels, audio card profiles, output sinks, or input sources, and more for easy access from most Ubuntu applications.
Like ALSA, PulseAudio is also designed to run with as few user interactions as possible. Whenever we need to change volume, balance, or input/output devices it is a PulseAudio module or application we or our application call.
A professional alternative to PulseAudio is the JACK audio server with more options to interact with our sound hardware and a better low latency support. Only few music production applications expect to have JACK running, which can be done in parallel to PulseAudio.
Application/Desktop integration
The Ubuntu sound system can further be controlled from applications that run from the Unity/GNOME desktop, such as a volume control applet.
Where any given application makes use of sound control will be up to the application developers. Some applications will only use ALSA, some need PulseAudio, some need JACK.
Therefore whenever we install another desktop manager on top of Ubuntu we may lose the desktop specific applications to control sound but still, ALSA and PulseAudio will run in the background for sound control.
We may have to install additional packages like e.g. pavucontrol , the pulseaudio GTK-based volume control application.
Is any of ALSA or PulseAudio running?
Both ALSA and PulseAudio come with command line appliciations to print out the state of our sound system.
PulseAudio:
pactl list
ALSA:
aplay -l
Both will give an error if the sound system is not running. ALSA will be loaded with the kernel, PulseAudio will be started later. If this was not the case we can start PulseAudio manually from the terminal with:
pulseaudio [options] ## option -D starts the daemon
In case we have audio issues I recommend reading the post written by David Henningsson on things we should not do befor we go further to debug our audio issue.
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
add a comment |
Your Answer
StackExchange.ready(function() {
var channelOptions = {
tags: "".split(" "),
id: "89"
};
initTagRenderer("".split(" "), "".split(" "), channelOptions);
StackExchange.using("externalEditor", function() {
// Have to fire editor after snippets, if snippets enabled
if (StackExchange.settings.snippets.snippetsEnabled) {
StackExchange.using("snippets", function() {
createEditor();
});
}
else {
createEditor();
}
});
function createEditor() {
StackExchange.prepareEditor({
heartbeatType: 'answer',
autoActivateHeartbeat: false,
convertImagesToLinks: true,
noModals: true,
showLowRepImageUploadWarning: true,
reputationToPostImages: 10,
bindNavPrevention: true,
postfix: "",
imageUploader: {
brandingHtml: "Powered by u003ca class="icon-imgur-white" href="https://imgur.com/"u003eu003c/au003e",
contentPolicyHtml: "User contributions licensed under u003ca href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"u003ecc by-sa 3.0 with attribution requiredu003c/au003e u003ca href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/content-policy"u003e(content policy)u003c/au003e",
allowUrls: true
},
onDemand: true,
discardSelector: ".discard-answer"
,immediatelyShowMarkdownHelp:true
});
}
});
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function () {
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2faskubuntu.com%2fquestions%2f426983%2fhow-can-i-tell-if-im-using-alsa-or-pulse-audio-by-default-switching-to-i3-wm%23new-answer', 'question_page');
}
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
Ubuntu uses both ALSA, and Pulseaudio for controlling sound input and output.
ALSA
ALSA serves as a kernel based system to connect your sound hardware to the operating system. All sound cards in your system will controlled using drivers and card specific settings. Most of this is done under the hood with no need for users to interfere.
In addition ALSA offers libraries and tools to control our sound system. The tool most of us may have come across may be the alsamixer, a semi-graphical terminal application to control sound volume, and mute state of all cards and profiles in our system.
We can give out sound to our soundcard simply by using ALSA without the need of PulseAudio ore anyother sound server.
Pulse Audio
On top of the ALSA base the PulseAudio sound server provides further tools to better control our sound system. This is done with modules to define volume levels, audio card profiles, output sinks, or input sources, and more for easy access from most Ubuntu applications.
Like ALSA, PulseAudio is also designed to run with as few user interactions as possible. Whenever we need to change volume, balance, or input/output devices it is a PulseAudio module or application we or our application call.
A professional alternative to PulseAudio is the JACK audio server with more options to interact with our sound hardware and a better low latency support. Only few music production applications expect to have JACK running, which can be done in parallel to PulseAudio.
Application/Desktop integration
The Ubuntu sound system can further be controlled from applications that run from the Unity/GNOME desktop, such as a volume control applet.
Where any given application makes use of sound control will be up to the application developers. Some applications will only use ALSA, some need PulseAudio, some need JACK.
Therefore whenever we install another desktop manager on top of Ubuntu we may lose the desktop specific applications to control sound but still, ALSA and PulseAudio will run in the background for sound control.
We may have to install additional packages like e.g. pavucontrol , the pulseaudio GTK-based volume control application.
Is any of ALSA or PulseAudio running?
Both ALSA and PulseAudio come with command line appliciations to print out the state of our sound system.
PulseAudio:
pactl list
ALSA:
aplay -l
Both will give an error if the sound system is not running. ALSA will be loaded with the kernel, PulseAudio will be started later. If this was not the case we can start PulseAudio manually from the terminal with:
pulseaudio [options] ## option -D starts the daemon
In case we have audio issues I recommend reading the post written by David Henningsson on things we should not do befor we go further to debug our audio issue.
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
add a comment |
Ubuntu uses both ALSA, and Pulseaudio for controlling sound input and output.
ALSA
ALSA serves as a kernel based system to connect your sound hardware to the operating system. All sound cards in your system will controlled using drivers and card specific settings. Most of this is done under the hood with no need for users to interfere.
In addition ALSA offers libraries and tools to control our sound system. The tool most of us may have come across may be the alsamixer, a semi-graphical terminal application to control sound volume, and mute state of all cards and profiles in our system.
We can give out sound to our soundcard simply by using ALSA without the need of PulseAudio ore anyother sound server.
Pulse Audio
On top of the ALSA base the PulseAudio sound server provides further tools to better control our sound system. This is done with modules to define volume levels, audio card profiles, output sinks, or input sources, and more for easy access from most Ubuntu applications.
Like ALSA, PulseAudio is also designed to run with as few user interactions as possible. Whenever we need to change volume, balance, or input/output devices it is a PulseAudio module or application we or our application call.
A professional alternative to PulseAudio is the JACK audio server with more options to interact with our sound hardware and a better low latency support. Only few music production applications expect to have JACK running, which can be done in parallel to PulseAudio.
Application/Desktop integration
The Ubuntu sound system can further be controlled from applications that run from the Unity/GNOME desktop, such as a volume control applet.
Where any given application makes use of sound control will be up to the application developers. Some applications will only use ALSA, some need PulseAudio, some need JACK.
Therefore whenever we install another desktop manager on top of Ubuntu we may lose the desktop specific applications to control sound but still, ALSA and PulseAudio will run in the background for sound control.
We may have to install additional packages like e.g. pavucontrol , the pulseaudio GTK-based volume control application.
Is any of ALSA or PulseAudio running?
Both ALSA and PulseAudio come with command line appliciations to print out the state of our sound system.
PulseAudio:
pactl list
ALSA:
aplay -l
Both will give an error if the sound system is not running. ALSA will be loaded with the kernel, PulseAudio will be started later. If this was not the case we can start PulseAudio manually from the terminal with:
pulseaudio [options] ## option -D starts the daemon
In case we have audio issues I recommend reading the post written by David Henningsson on things we should not do befor we go further to debug our audio issue.
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
add a comment |
Ubuntu uses both ALSA, and Pulseaudio for controlling sound input and output.
ALSA
ALSA serves as a kernel based system to connect your sound hardware to the operating system. All sound cards in your system will controlled using drivers and card specific settings. Most of this is done under the hood with no need for users to interfere.
In addition ALSA offers libraries and tools to control our sound system. The tool most of us may have come across may be the alsamixer, a semi-graphical terminal application to control sound volume, and mute state of all cards and profiles in our system.
We can give out sound to our soundcard simply by using ALSA without the need of PulseAudio ore anyother sound server.
Pulse Audio
On top of the ALSA base the PulseAudio sound server provides further tools to better control our sound system. This is done with modules to define volume levels, audio card profiles, output sinks, or input sources, and more for easy access from most Ubuntu applications.
Like ALSA, PulseAudio is also designed to run with as few user interactions as possible. Whenever we need to change volume, balance, or input/output devices it is a PulseAudio module or application we or our application call.
A professional alternative to PulseAudio is the JACK audio server with more options to interact with our sound hardware and a better low latency support. Only few music production applications expect to have JACK running, which can be done in parallel to PulseAudio.
Application/Desktop integration
The Ubuntu sound system can further be controlled from applications that run from the Unity/GNOME desktop, such as a volume control applet.
Where any given application makes use of sound control will be up to the application developers. Some applications will only use ALSA, some need PulseAudio, some need JACK.
Therefore whenever we install another desktop manager on top of Ubuntu we may lose the desktop specific applications to control sound but still, ALSA and PulseAudio will run in the background for sound control.
We may have to install additional packages like e.g. pavucontrol , the pulseaudio GTK-based volume control application.
Is any of ALSA or PulseAudio running?
Both ALSA and PulseAudio come with command line appliciations to print out the state of our sound system.
PulseAudio:
pactl list
ALSA:
aplay -l
Both will give an error if the sound system is not running. ALSA will be loaded with the kernel, PulseAudio will be started later. If this was not the case we can start PulseAudio manually from the terminal with:
pulseaudio [options] ## option -D starts the daemon
In case we have audio issues I recommend reading the post written by David Henningsson on things we should not do befor we go further to debug our audio issue.
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
Ubuntu uses both ALSA, and Pulseaudio for controlling sound input and output.
ALSA
ALSA serves as a kernel based system to connect your sound hardware to the operating system. All sound cards in your system will controlled using drivers and card specific settings. Most of this is done under the hood with no need for users to interfere.
In addition ALSA offers libraries and tools to control our sound system. The tool most of us may have come across may be the alsamixer, a semi-graphical terminal application to control sound volume, and mute state of all cards and profiles in our system.
We can give out sound to our soundcard simply by using ALSA without the need of PulseAudio ore anyother sound server.
Pulse Audio
On top of the ALSA base the PulseAudio sound server provides further tools to better control our sound system. This is done with modules to define volume levels, audio card profiles, output sinks, or input sources, and more for easy access from most Ubuntu applications.
Like ALSA, PulseAudio is also designed to run with as few user interactions as possible. Whenever we need to change volume, balance, or input/output devices it is a PulseAudio module or application we or our application call.
A professional alternative to PulseAudio is the JACK audio server with more options to interact with our sound hardware and a better low latency support. Only few music production applications expect to have JACK running, which can be done in parallel to PulseAudio.
Application/Desktop integration
The Ubuntu sound system can further be controlled from applications that run from the Unity/GNOME desktop, such as a volume control applet.
Where any given application makes use of sound control will be up to the application developers. Some applications will only use ALSA, some need PulseAudio, some need JACK.
Therefore whenever we install another desktop manager on top of Ubuntu we may lose the desktop specific applications to control sound but still, ALSA and PulseAudio will run in the background for sound control.
We may have to install additional packages like e.g. pavucontrol , the pulseaudio GTK-based volume control application.
Is any of ALSA or PulseAudio running?
Both ALSA and PulseAudio come with command line appliciations to print out the state of our sound system.
PulseAudio:
pactl list
ALSA:
aplay -l
Both will give an error if the sound system is not running. ALSA will be loaded with the kernel, PulseAudio will be started later. If this was not the case we can start PulseAudio manually from the terminal with:
pulseaudio [options] ## option -D starts the daemon
In case we have audio issues I recommend reading the post written by David Henningsson on things we should not do befor we go further to debug our audio issue.
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
edited 1 hour ago
Jonathan
1,39931534
1,39931534
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
answered Feb 27 '14 at 12:47
TakkatTakkat
109k37254379
109k37254379
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
add a comment |
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
1
1
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
@Takkat amazing explanation, thanks a lot. I have been for quite a long time trying to get the basic understanding of the audio system in Linux and Ubuntu.
– AlexN
Apr 17 '16 at 21:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
In my raspberry pi system, "pactl list" returns "Connection refused", but "pactl --server 127.0.0.1 list" works. exporting the environment variable "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1" allows pulseaudio clients to correctly connect. Any ideas what i'm missing ? This is on a raspberry pi.
– Joao Costa
Jun 19 '16 at 3:02
add a comment |
Thanks for contributing an answer to Ask Ubuntu!
- Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
- Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
- Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function () {
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2faskubuntu.com%2fquestions%2f426983%2fhow-can-i-tell-if-im-using-alsa-or-pulse-audio-by-default-switching-to-i3-wm%23new-answer', 'question_page');
}
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function () {
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
});
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
