Hey folks, a little questionnaire - since we now have PulseAudio support I would like to know if you're using any or planning to switch to pulseaudio.

Let's click it!

9.14 on ubuntu 9.04, but would upgrade if it improved skype experience.

thanks,
joshua

4 out of 5 top distros on distrowatch today uses pulseaudio. Pulseaudio rules.

Thanks for asking for our feedback. I hope you are allowed to publish the new version soon, since I have been having a lot of audio problems with Skype on Ubuntu 9.04....

Good luck.

KDE here. No PulseAudio, Phonon with xine backend

This seems a strange thing to ask I think as you should be able to build Skype to support PulseAudio versions that are currently shipped with major distros and as many future versions as possible.

Hi Berkus,

I am a Skype4Linux user who has been anxiously waiting for the next BETA. I have been watching the blog http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/ closely for months now hoping for some news. None came, but I was silent and patient. I speak now hoping that this feedback (on pulseaudio use) is helpful.

I think it is typical of the Linux community to want to help improve software for all. The inability to do this and lack of news or updates causes frustration in many users. This frustration leads to negative comments and "panic". But this is natural for people who are powerless to do anything.

You have the power to ease this frustration. Good luck in doing so!

If we (the Linux community) can help in any way, just ask! I'm sure you will get a strong response.

I administer several computers, most laptops under Ubuntu with 0.9.14, most desktops with Fedora/pulseaudio 0.9.15 and over (really case by case).
This is bound to evolve quickly anyway, Since those distributions have a development cycle of 6 months.

I'm the package maintainer for PulseAudio in Ubuntu. I would suggest supporting version 0.9.14, since thats the version of Ubuntu thats got the best pulseaudio setup to date. If you'd rather support a newer version, thats fine as well. In fact, ver 0.9.15 would be better, since it allows streams to be identified as music/movies, or phone calls etc. So Skype could identify itself as a phone call, which would allow pulseaudio to pause any audio a user has playing, to take the skype call, should the user wish to do so.

Mandriva 2009.1:
pulseaudio-0.9.15-2.0.4mdv2009.1
phonon-xine as backend in KDE (skype with audio output plughw)
With phonon-gstreamer skype audio output plughw doesn't work, and with phonon-gstreamer skype audio output pulse has stuttering sound.

hmm... maybe you do. We still don't.

it is very strange that you ask such thing...
оf cource pulseaudio 0.9.15 and above...
distros which didn't use it yet will use it soon!

Fedora 11 64bit pulseaudio-0.9.15-14.fc11.x86_64

'not using and not planning to use'

Have 0.9.14 installed as default with openSUSE 11.1, but it's switched off in YaST's sound setup. Like others above have stated, I would prefer to use Phonon for managing things as I am now running a KDE4 system. The only thing I'm missing with Phonon at present is per-application settings.

Afaik, Phonon still doesn't have low-latency I/O support for VOIP.

Dicci,

...and 9.15 here btw, also I would not care a lot between using ALSA or Pulse as far everything work as it should.

Maybe it will be better in the future, but pulseaudio is a piece of s### right now: having a process use 15% of the CPU(s) when NO AUDIO is played is simply unacceptable. I am sad skype for linux dev is hindered by trying to support this.

KDE 4 here, too. opensuse 11.1 64 bit

Pulseaudio is just a pain in the ... The first thing I am doing is removing from my linux and miracle the sound is working as expected. Ok I cannot connect my bluetooth headset but it was not working with pulseaudio do don't care too much.

Use phonon please that will help everybody and perhaps we will stop this heresy to put PA everywhere for no real benefit fot the end user but pain.

Hi, Arch Linux 64, not using Pulse Audio at this moment, but it has nice features (like adjusting volume level per application). If it starts to work without problems, particularly with Skype (main reason why it isn't on my laptop), I'm going to use it. Anyway in Arch repo ATM: pulseaudio 0.9.15

Does it work with Ubuntu ?

it == what?

PA is a pain, specially for kde users. When I discovered that all my sound problems were fixed killing PA, I uninstalled it from my openSUSE 11.1 box and now everything is right.
Beside this strange obsession with changing the volume in a per app basis (obsession I can't understand), which are the benefits PA provides? All I read in the net let me with a "I don't need that" expression in my face...

Another KDE4/Suse user here that removed Pulse Audio to fix flaky audio.

I'm just using the version that comes with latest release of Ubuntu, what ever version that might be at the time (currently Jaunty 9.04). However, I remove PulseAudio on some of my machines but would love the day when sound just works in Linux.

Fortunately, Debian lenny does not install pulseaudio by default (the version in the repositories is 0.9.10) and I will not install it, because it has been the source of big problems when I was running Ubuntu 8.10 and OpenSuSe 11.1 (especially the last one). Though I will admit in that I had no trouble with Pulse 0.9.10 in Ubuntu 8.10, except with skype.

I'm using pulseaudio 0.9.15-14 on fedora 11. My sound chip is Intel HD audio. I'm using Skype version 2.0.0.72-fc5, the latest on the Skype repository.

In general, sound works perfectly on my system. However, to make Skype sound work I've had to bypass pulse by selecting "HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0)" in Skype's options->sound devices dialog. If I set "pulse" in this dialog, I get only loud crackles.

Thanks for all your hard work on Skype for linux! Hope the new release is coming soon.

Phonon has different purpose dude, and as Berkus said already, it doesnt have low latency, PA support might be not really that hard but phonon output would be a both, painful to devel and the overall quality would be worse. plus ther eis no need since Phonon can output trough pulse as it should, Also, what about users that doesnt have access to KDE4? you cant leave them behind.

Phonon, ALSA or Jack is something I really dont care, hopefully Skype will choose whatever has the best performance ans escalability for the system.

Skype does not work with pulseaudio on Ubuntu 8.04.1. I had to uninstall pulseaudio and install esound instead. That's the only way I could get Skype to work.

I've got Arch Linux as main operating system and I use OSS. Yeah OSS. It WORKS! (It really does).. Not like ALSA + Pulse +whatever... it just normally does its job. Really nice audio system. Folletto, you should check it out too.

(And I agree. PA is just a pain in the arse.. ditch it. ALSA ..well.. not better, but at least it works..somehow..sometimes..)

OSS huh? now try to listen to music while calling over Skype

By the way, somebody already published a fix for Pulse and F11 but cant find it, if anyone here remember where it is, ty! You replied to it Berkus, maybe you can remember

ty.

I use pulse, but had to use the statically linked oss version of skype, otherwise it used 100% cpu (of one of my i7 cores) and about 60kBytes/sec of internet bandwidth when in a quiet call. With the static OSS version, it uses only a few percent CPU and about 1/5 as much network bandwidth. Using pulse and the statically linked OSS version seems to have everything working fine.

Sorry to say this, but what is the relevance of the results of this poll? Instead of asking the users whether they use (a more or less recent version of) Pulseaudio or not, Skype should ask the (major) distribution whether they will continue Pulseaudio integration.
The only relevance to this matter is how many users use KDE (phonon) and how many users are using Gnome (Pulseaudio). Options like 'not using pulsaudio and not planning to' and 'not using pulseaudio, but want to in future' don't give any useful information.
Considering the long awaited release of the next beta of Skype for Linux, the options of what version we use are also irrelevant. In (a short) time the vast majority will use the latest version. Once again it would be useful to contact the major Linuxdistributions to get to know what version of Pulseaudio is used in their supported or enterprise editions.

In my opinion this poll is just a waste of time. Just release a public beta and you'll get all the information you want via bugreports.

I just did some research and Ubuntu seems to be the most popular Linux followed by Fedora so these are the distributions to contact regarding the design of the nex Skype. I believe that it makes most sense to base apps on the most recent versions of the distros. In the case of Ubuntu, that's 9.04 and in the case of Fedora, it's 11. One of my sources of information was Distrowatch. If you look at the default 6 month range for popularity of distros, Ubuntu is by far the most popular but if you look at the last 30 days, Fedora is pretty close. If these distro companies would and could tell Skype what their plans are, that would be great information too.

Regarding the use of Skype in professional environments, I wouldn't base the development of the stable releases on the most recent releases of Ubuntu and Fedora, but on Ubuntu LTS (currently 8.04), RHEL and Novell SUSE.

Ubuntu and Fedora have a 6-months-cycle and these releases are all bleeding edge. The users of these distributions are well aware that they may encounter compatibility problems. Nevertheless, these releases are perfect to test the beta-releases of Skype.

I'm a Fedora user and it has taken some time for PulseAudio to settle. Now I'm running F11 64bit on a HP 8710w laptop and when I install the necessary i586 dependencies for skype and tell skype to use the "pulse" output device in the config skype output audio work decently (but with some glitches). I also need to add myself to the "audio" group to get pulse audio to work OK (the /dev/snd dir has group "audio" owned by root). In F12 policykit is introduced to improve permission managed among users. A lot of my personal issues with PA has been due to permission issues and not directly related to PA.

Now, on the same system I'm also running WinXP under VirtualBox (v3.02) that has good sound with Pulse and when I run skype (v4) from the WinXP guest sound work really well from skype. I'm not always running VirtualBox hence I rely on my linux skype version.

From my personal perspective the role out of Pulse in Fedora has been a bit painful but right now I'm really happy with the sound control etc etc.

It is really nice to see all apps that does ALSA pop up in realtime in the PA Audio control.

Since there is no project in F12 to drop PA;
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList
I expect PA to remain there :-)

Ove

I'm using Fedora 11 with Pulseaudio 0.9.15-14.
Impatiently waiting to upgrade Skype.

When is the pulseaudio version going to be released? I hope it fixes alsa issues as well.

One thing is bluetooth does not seem to work that well with PA.

PA 0.9.15
fedora 11 64bit
gnome 2.26.3 however might switch to kde if i find no issues with it.

hello everyone I'm not using pulseaudio right now but planning to use it in the near future.

Fedora 11, x86_64, PA 0.9.15. Earlier versions of PA have irritated me enough to disable it. With the release of Fedora 11, PA has become so integrated it's more of a pain to turn it off than just deal with it. So, deal with it I have. Turns out it totally rocks. What finally made it work so great? Trashing my .asoundrc did the trick. Bluetooth works without any fuss of any kind. Besides a minor issue, I'm sticking with it.

Unfortunately, Skype 2.0.0.72 is no longer work-aroundable with my current PA environment.

This is either a lie or just plain misguided. There's a howto on Pardus linux forums explaining how to make skype 2.0 co-exist nicely with pulse installation.

It seems like a nice workaround and it may work for some, but in my case it freezes the flash video playback.

My diagnosis is - this is something else. Verify you have proper dmix enabled on the default device though.

I tried this workaround on a completely different system but same OS (Ubuntu 9.04) and got exactly the same result. Everything works perfectly (simultaneous usage of skype and music playback using pulse) excepting flash playback. It's weird since audio works, just the video is freezing.

well, skype-mid has just arrived into the Ubuntu 9.04 partner repository!

Sadly this version doesn't solve the problem regarding pulse audio.

Hi! Just in case it's a possible fix, maybe look at trying:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libflashsupport flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound

as per Part A, step 3 of http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578

Anyway, best wishes

These packages weren't installed on my system. By the way, I tried this workaround with alsa 1.0.20, 1.0.19 and 1.0.18 and as well with PulseAudio 0.9.14 and 0.9.15 with exactly the same result. Is there anybody using Ubuntu 9.04 for whom this workaround actually works?