[Pkg-games-ubuntu] [Bug 503780] Re: OpenAL Soft doesn't work with PulseAudio (Ubuntu's default sound system)

[bdoe]

"just add a file to your home folder name .alsoftrc and inside put
"drivers=pulse"

this fixed the problem for me and proves that the default behaviour is
wrong and needs to be fixed!"

This actually *broke* openAL for me!

What I did: Edited ~/.openalrc and added the line "drivers=pulse" (the
existing drivers line is commented out).

Launched gmplayer, set audio preference to OpenAL. Restarted gmplayer.

Loaded an MP3 file. Pressed Play.

Observed PulseAudio Manager opened a new sink named "Playback Stream",
with gmplayer as owner.

Observed gmplayer froze completely. No response from UI whatsoever. No
sound from gmplayer.

Killed the sink using PulseAudio Manager. This unfroze gmplayer. Pressed
Play again, and observed the same indications again. Killed the sink,
then changed gmplayer's audio prefs to use Pulse directly. Pressed Play
again, and gmplayer played normally.

This is with libopenal.so.1.10.622

$ ls /usr/lib/libopenal*
libopenal.so.1  libopenal.so.1.10.622

-- 
OpenAL Soft doesn't work with PulseAudio (Ubuntu's default sound system)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/503780
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Status in “openal-soft” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released
Status in “pulseaudio” package in Ubuntu: Fix Released

Bug description:
OpenAL Soft (the default OpenAL implementation) causes troubles in combination with PulseAudio that is used by default on the Ubuntu desktop. These troubles can be very different going from just no sound to crashes and freezes of apps that use OpenAL (mostly games).

The root cause for this seems to be that OpenAL Soft doesn't use it's new pulse output on systems with pulse running ( http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#OpenALApplications ) and/or the pulse output is a bit buggy. So instead of using Pulse directly (& correctly) it uses ALSA as it's output and because ALSA also has a pulse plugin the sound is routed to PulseAudio and then back to ALSA. But this seems to be buggy, in Ubuntu at least ;).

I did this new report to synergize all the efforts of the various reports about this issue, so there is already plenty of information on the different troubles and on suggested solutions in the duplicates. That's why we should try to stay focused here.