slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt

ChangeLog.txt

+--------------------------+
Thu Apr 26 01:34:12 UTC 2018
Don't like PulseAudio? Well... I hear you. Personally, it works for me, and it
makes it easier to switch between multiple audio inputs and outputs compared
to using plain ALSA. PulseAudio got off to a rocky start in the Linux world,
where it found itself adopted before it was ready (it was even billed on its
own website at the time as "the software that currently breaks your audio").
It's my opinion that the reputation that PulseAudio acquired due to problems
back then isn't deserved any longer. If your hardware supports the sampling
rate of the audio data you're trying to play, PulseAudio will not resample it
(and if your hardware doesn't support that rate, resampling can hardly be
avoided). The increased latency has not been an issue here. Nevertheless, I
recognize that there are use cases where PulseAudio is still a detriment.
While I don't generally recommend removing PulseAudio, I'm not going to cram
it down your throat. So, if you'd like to be rid of PulseAudio, head over to
the new extra/pure-alsa-system directory and follow the instructions in the
README file there, and you'll have a PulseAudio-free pure ALSA system.
Thanks to orbea who sent me a small patch for the mpg123.SlackBuild so that
it would detect the lack of PulseAudio and not try to build in support, which
got me to thinking about all of this. Cheers! :-)

+--------------------------+
Thu Dec 17 23:02:41 UTC 2020
extra/pure-alsa-system/kde-runtime-4.14.3-i586-8_alsa.txz:  Removed.
  I'm starting to lean towards removing all of these packages as there are
  ways to configure PulseAudio to get out of the way. See (for example) this
  article mentioned in a blog post by alienBOB:
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#PulseAudio_as_a_minimal_unintrusive_dumb_pipe_to_ALSA

+--------------------------+
Fri Dec 25 00:52:08 UTC 2020
extra/pure-alsa-system/*:  Removed.
  This served a purpose during the pure ALSA to PulseAudio transition, but
  it's time for it to go away. If the latency is an issue for your use case,
  a look around should turn up documentation on how to reduce it, or how to
  send output directly to ALSA without having to uninstall PulseAudio or
  recompile anything that's linked to it. As an example, see this one (which
  was mentioned here before):
  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#PulseAudio_as_a_minimal_unintrusive_dumb_pipe_to_ALSA