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Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by PaulHoule on Monday May 12, 2025 @11:00AM (#43963813)
Windows is better but not much. My big PC at home isn't completely reliable to attach to Bluetooth headphones, some of which might be the fault of the particular headphones, but some of which seems to be the fault of having various sorts of "virtual" drivers installed such as for Steam, MQ 3, Immersed, etc.
Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by mystified5016 on Monday May 12, 2025 @11:51AM (#43964389)
Windows' Bluetooth stack is an absolute dumpster fire. They trashed the perfectly good BT stack from windows 7 and apparently had an unpaid intern write the replacement.

My day job is building widgets that connect to a windows PC over Bluetooth. The situation is so bad that we're building a dedicated RF adapter so we can have a sane stack under our control.

If your program is scanning for a particular device in the background, that device will never show up in the windows BT pairing menu. I can't even imagine how that happens. Many API calls do nothing or return garbage, many BT features are just not exposed at all, despite windows clearly having that data internally.

W10 never even had BT audio sink. You could not play audio from a remote device to your PC. W7 had it and I think W11 finally got it a few years back. Linux has always had it.

Windows' Bluetooth stack is no contest the worst available on the market. It's astonishing how poor quality Microsoft products are these days.

Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by Macha on Monday May 12, 2025 @01:20PM (#43965380)
Yeah, I always feel surprised when people call out the Linux audio experience as uniquely bad. Meanwhile on Windows I need to jam voicemeter in the middle to separate inputs and outputs so I don't have games crashing to desktop because my bluetooth headset ran out of battery, while Mac makes each individual application implement volume control UI.
Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by Ekaros on Monday May 12, 2025 @01:42PM (#43965607)
After upgrading to Intel Bluetooth/Wlan module I have had lot less issues.

But in general Bluetooth is just bad protocol audio...

Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by Artoooooor on Monday May 12, 2025 @04:32PM (#43967156)
I'm still baffled by difference between Audacity on Windows and Linux. On Windows I have n+1 recording devices, where n is number of microphones, the 1 being stereo mix. On Linux I have gazillion cryptic names and I pray for each of them to even work. And neither of them is stereo mix, for such advanced feature I have to enable external mixer.
Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by loa_in_ on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @03:56AM (#43970576)
Stereo mix is a surprisingly neutral nontrivial feature. How do you mix the channels, are you okay with limitations of software mixer, do you want to hardware mix it on supported audio chipsets, what stereo mix means when you have three or more microphones?
Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by pseudosaid on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @05:38PM (#43978032)
A stereo mix is in fact trivial and roughly assumes a left right speaker arrangement. Software summing is math and is the same across digital audio workstations because math is math. Are there 3 or more microphones? doesnt matter, each mic is a mono input. trying to capture a facsimile of a perceived stereo field? use ORTF mic spacing and hard pan those mono inputs appropriately.

Stereo is just dual mono. its that simple. Summing is just math, its that trivial.

Creating a mix of multiple inputs for a stereo lr output? also completely trivial from a technical standpoint. Hardly trivial from a creative pov, but that isnt what this is about.

Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by okdood64 on Monday May 12, 2025 @07:51PM (#43968524)
Precisely the reason I don't understand how people can daily drive Linux on their laptop. (I say laptop because additionally: trackpad issues, Bluetooth issues, etc.)

Is it much better than 10 or 20 years ago? Yes.

Is it still annoying enough and sometimes colossal waste of time? Yes. Just use a Macbook and be done with it.

Re:The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene by xrhobo on Tuesday May 13, 2025 @06:15AM (#43971374)
I think it depends on what laptop.

Asus laptops have always worked flawlessly for me.

I am writing this on an Asus laptop with linux mint. Everything just works perfect out of the box.

I could buy three of these laptops instead of the same setup on a mac is the major selling point for me.