Keep cool!

[Letalis Sonus]

That's what we used to do before PA

Before PA we still had dmix, the times where hardware mixing was a requirement were much longer ago.

I already had my fun with OSS, not going into that direction again.

 

[Caine]

that looks more like pacman-on-a-stick

Hahaha, nice. Why is that not a thing?

 

[NOP]

Recently I bought some cheap stereo bluetooth headset to test if I could use something like it with the pyra.
I got it to play music from my laptop (using pulse).
But lost the interest to get the headset part working.

It somewhat unpractical at times to get it to work, requiring switching back and fourth between profiles until it accepts the correct profile, but besides that it works quite solidly if connected.

(I tried with xubuntu using blueman-manager and of course pulseaudio)

 

[ingoreis]

Realy nice to see the Progress.

A Question:
The "Sealing" is it only for Dirt and Dust or maybe the Pyra will get little Waterproof against Rain?

I haven't tested it yet, as the speakers aren't properly setup in our OS version right now (Pulseaudio configuration) - and therefore, playing sound right now drives the vibra motor
This is cool.... but not really useful

I'll let you know once I can test it

This Sounds realy funny.
And can we toggle the Keyboard Lights in Sync to the Music too?

With that we can maybe Change the Pyra into a little Disco Machine.

 

[Grench]

A Question:
The "Sealing" is it only for Dirt and Dust or maybe the Pyra will get little Waterproof against Rain?

No - this is just the sealing for the back sides of the speakers so that they have a defined space/volume/cavity.

 

[Binky]

^That is, the sealing is needed for acoustic reasons.

The space behind a loudspeaker cone has a huge effect on the overall sound. If it's too small, then the air-pressure behind it will limit the cone's movement. If the sound from the back of the speaker leaks out, it will interfere with the sound from the front. If the resonant frequency of the space is just right, it can improve the speaker's frequency response. ...and so on.

I suspect it's something of a black art - but I know it always pays to follow the manufacturers' instructions when designing speaker enclosures!

 

[trix]

On the PulseAudio topic... I resisted PA for years in favor of ALSA. Every time I tried to use PA I ran into issues.

However, within the last few months, I started using things that had issues with ALSA. Like Brutal Legends through Wine on my Gentoo PC. For whatever reason, the music and the voiceovers would cut each other off and one or the other would stop working entirely. Moreover, I couldn't do things like play music in the background via MPV while playing League of Legends. Basically, ALSA would not mix multiple audio streams, as mentioned ITT. Because of this, I switched everything entirely over to PulseAudio on my PC and all of those problems vanished and it actually works great, except for one issue: Whenever it has to mix multiple streams together (the whole purpose of my switching to PA) the resulting audio output sounds like crap. Very reduced in quality.

I hope this wont be a thing on the Pyra. I don't often have the need to mix multiple audio sources like that on a portable device, as I'd usually just use one program/game at a time (and even then it's usually an emulator), but I would be highly disappointed if the audio quality turned to shit the first time I tried to listen to my own music in the background while playing some game or something. The exceptional audio quality is one of my absolute favorite features of my Pandora (thanks @MWeston) and I wouldn't go near PA on my beloved Pandy for fear that my OCRemix FLACs would sound less amazing.

That said, it's entirely possible that the degraded audio PA causes is something easily fixed and I just don't know how. I don't have the free time I used to so I haven't bothered looking deeply into it as of yet.

In the end, I trust ED and the community members to get this right. Especially given how much the Pandora exceeded my expectations in the audio department. I'm the kind of idiot that spends a few thousand dollars on a Rega turntable and a few thousand more on a PreAmp and speakers and audiophile-pressed Vinyl, because my ears insist that I need to be able to close my eyes and hear exactly where in the room each instrument is playing from, and if I can't do that I consider the audio source to be crap.

The Pandora with nice headphones and good FLAC files (Thanks OCRemix!) is the closest I can get to my Rega setup with digital music, and is candy for my ears.

Why do all of my posts end up 50 pages long? I only ever intend to add a comment to the thread and yet this huge wall of text seems to always be the result. Gah!

 

[klapse]

Very cool trix. Another audiophile here and the main use for my pandora is playing flac on my hifi-system.

PA is probably resampling your audio which will put it though a filter, which you can avoid when doing linear mixing of same-frequency sources.

 

[elwing]

^That is, the sealing is needed for acoustic reasons.

The space behind a loudspeaker cone has a huge effect on the overall sound. If it's too small, then the air-pressure behind it will limit the cone's movement. If the sound from the back of the speaker leaks out, it will interfere with the sound from the front. If the resonant frequency of the space is just right, it can improve the speaker's frequency response. ...and so on.

I suspect it's something of a black art - but I know it always pays to follow the manufacturers' instructions when designing speaker enclosures!

Can't you even burn some of these new speakers without an appropriate volume behind? I am pretty sure I heard something about that...

 

[Letalis Sonus]

However, within the last few months, I started using things that had issues with ALSA.

The issue is that PA has become so omnipresence (and with Steam's "only Ubuntu is officially supported" thing something that can be assumed to just be available among most commercial Linux game developers) that it has led people to neglecting ALSA support, even though it's what should be the lowest common denominator due to being the one that officially provides the drivers and therefore always being available (and what works perfectly fine with PA's ALSA plugin as well).

For example Payday 2 doesn't even start without PA running, even though it uses SDL for audio - the common practice of telling it to use ALSA doesn't work here (what the hell, Overkill?). The remake of Grim Fardango provides ALSA support, but has been hardcoded with the weird ass buffer settings of PA - it only works without glitches if I violate my ALSA config with such unholy buffer settings that it makes other programs crash, I probably would need to abandon several output channels just to be able to use sane settings with this, which is not something I'm happy with, either.

Brütal Legend on the other hand works perfectly fine with ALSA if you simply use the native Linux client - why are you using Wine for that? Never had any Wine-related issues with ALSA so far, though.

 

[tarator]

A Question:
The "Sealing" is it only for Dirt and Dust or maybe the Pyra will get little Waterproof against Rain?

The sealing seems to be essential for a decent sound quality.
Look At this news-post: It's loud

 

[thebaitmaster]

How hard would it be to modify ubuntu in order to port it? Is there such a thing as a x64 or x86 translator config setting that runs at startup before the os itself boots which could allow desktop oses to be loaded with generic drivers? Would a translator be possible? (like translating or reordering the bit values of a program assembled for a different architecture sort of like encryption without the passkey - im thinking something like this would go along the lines of a primitive encryption method used before computers, "this value" = "this usable value" or something)

 

[Black Sliver]

the resulting audio output sounds like crap. Very reduced in quality.

Sounds like up-/down-sampling issues to me.
PA has to re-sample if mixing streams of different sample rate. It will either open the card with 44.1 or 48kHz and re-sample all non-matching streams.

"Cheap" sound cards only support 48/96/192kHz and are crappy at up-sampling (modern formats like opus only support 48kHz/n for that reason). If your stream (e.g. FLAC) is 44.1kHz and the hardware is set to 44.1kHz emulation on 48kHz, but PA is set to 48kHz, the audio-stream will get up-down-up-sampled, which definitely sounds crappy
(Stuff magically worked for me, so I have no idea how to configure this)

 

[sebt3]

How hard would it be to modify ubuntu in order to port it?

Ubuntu is just a reduced debian + shit and have an ARMHF branch just like debian.
All you need to boot an unbuntu on a pyra is our uboot and kernel and done. It's as easy as this. But why would one do this monstruosity is out of my mind...

 

[Black Sliver]

Speaking from experience: because of the release schedule, supported packages and LTS. At home I prefer arch (rolling). Ubuntu lies somewhere between debian and arch.
Having support from canonical would be nice for promotion, but they only promote "Ubuntu Core" for ARM/embedded at the moment, which is another use-case.

 

[rygD]

If you bring Ubuntu, you might as well being Windows too. None of either for me, thanks.

 

[AndiTheBest]

Steam has support for Ubuntu, so if we get Ubuntu working on the Pyra, the Steam guys have to look that Steam will run on the Pyra.
They just need to recompile all the games for ARM and switch to OpenGLES, nothing else

 

[Caine]

The steam guys don't have to do anything. I am also pretty sure that they won't do anything.

 

[sebt3]

Steam has support for Ubuntu, so if we get Ubuntu working on the Pyra, the Steam guys have to look that Steam will run on the Pyra.
They just need to recompile all the games for ARM and switch to OpenGLES, nothing else

Steam support x86 ubuntu. But work perfectly on debian too.
Having done the exercice a few times, I can tell you it's not that easy.

 

[Xcl4m4t10n]

The steam guys don't have to do anything. I am also pretty sure that they won't do anything.

Call me crazy, but i think he waw Just joking around...