Why sound in linux sucks
I stumbled across this year old, well written piece today. It does a stellar job explaining why audio in Linux is such a complete nightmare to this day. Granted, audio was alot worse 10 years ago (especially with ISA), but the un-ending, 'from the ground up' redesigns of audio in Linux every few years is a solution in search of a problem. Back in the 2.2.x (and somewhat in the 2.4.x) kernel days, OSS just worked(tm). Nothing, and I mean nothing, got better with ALSA. Now we're getting PulseAudio foisted upon us, which is yet another layer of craptitude. Googling on the phrase "pulseaudio is not working" turns up 1100 hits. That's madness for a technology which hasn't been in mainstream Linux distros (Fedora & Ubuntu) for more than a year. I can say from first hand experience that PulseAudio is a horrific nightmare. When it works at all (which seems to be less and less often), its goal is to be the one stop shopping of the audio-mixer world. But sadly, in so doing, you get *less* control over your audio. While I used to be able to tweak a huge number of audio numbers via alsamixer, with pulseaudio turned on, I'm lucky if I get 2. And mostly, its just 1 mixer nob, which doesn't even have the range (or gain) that I'd get with pulseaudio disabled.
Now pulseaudio can be disabled (to fall back to regular, crappy ALSA) by deleting /etc/alsa/pulse-default.conf, but it claws its way back from beyond the grave every time there's a random alsa update. I've yet to locate a sane way to disable it altogether that didn't get over-ridden or broken later on.