Just two more random examples:

RPi 3, audio would hang randomly when opening a new process using audio from another using audio. The solution would be to either play an audio sample from the command line to unclog the audio system, or uninstall PulseAudio.

Ubuntu 16.04. Rewinding the video while using mplayer could cause the audio to play at a faster rate. Again uninstalling PulseAudio would solve the problem.

I often feared PA, and something in ALSA (I almost know zero about linux audio stack) made it a zero effort / 99% working thing that matched what I want for audio, that is a no sweat thing that just push sound. I can live without multi room networked audio, but having local audio crash randomly is too much a PITA. Feels like having lisp macros on top of VBA.

That said I wish we could find a better solution. Something between ALSA and PA. Also PA demands quality driver, IIRC Lennard told he cannot get blamed for that, it's a bit like GPUs in a way; and I wish we'd have open hardware audio chip that were simple and not lying.

That said a default fallback would be so good. I can't stop thinking that LP writes things for his own world and leave it there when he's "satisfied" with it; even if it means shit for the rest. Which means the issue is that he shouldn't be in charge of socially impactful components.

Unless you have examples of solid patches fixing these kind of problems that he rejected, this is a significantly unfair statement.

At least that’s what’s been apparent to me from the things that I’ve read by him and about him.

And I'm not sure it's really ego.. I'd rate him at about 0.07geohots.

Exactly. Does it support redirecting audio streams to another machine on the same network? That's a vital feature in our hackspace, where everyone can send audio to the room speakers via PA, and it's also used extensively in my living room (where the speakers are connected to the home server).

I've read a pulseaudio guru post explaining that when you know what you are doing you can work out a pulseaudio config that reduce pulseaudio latency issues, real time resampling, drop outs and high cpu usage. Just don't use the default config.

This is a common issue. It happens on Windows and Mac, as well. Am I to understand you don't experience it with some other way of handling sound (e.g. not using PulseAudio)? Are all of them being driven by the same program?

I DJ, and have used multiple independent interfaces in the past; there were frequently pops and warbles as the various timing crystals in the various interfaces fell out of sync and were forced back into sync by the software. It happened on both Windows and Linux (though it was slightly less pronounced on Linux, and I never figured out why). JACK might be the best way to deal with that problem on Linux, though I never tried it (I just switched to a dedicated DJ controller with multiple outs and headphone output).

But, it's a common enough problem that most DJ software has something about the problem in their FAQ.

Works every single time. last time I did it was around March. (I still don't know how it creeps back into my computers.)

Last time pulse was creating problems for me I decided that since I was now writing an application that links to the sound system, let's stop linking to low level functions and use pulse abstractions that some people claim to be better.

Turns out that the pulse "abstractions" are basically verbatim copies of alsa. Just with some added badly documented options. Some with very descriptive names, other with cryptic ones, but whatever, no option seems to do exactly what its name implies. Besides, pulse abstracts away most of the flexibility of the sound hardware, so you can't use it, and well, every time I tried running something with it, I got an assertion failure on pulse code... Always with some completely non-descriptive description.