Topic by JD

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  • JD
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  • Registered: 18-02-2018
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Topic: Ubuntu Studio, PulseAudio, and a sample rate mismatch

I am running Pianoteq 6 on Ubuntu Studio.

I have two different audio interfaces I use. I had some frustration with one of these where sometimes I would start Pianoteq and find that A 440 was sounding at 405 hz (and latency seemed bad). After I measured this with a tuner and then realized that 440/405 = 48000/44100, I just reconfigured this output to run at 44100 instead of 48K, and the problem went away.

But as to the root cause of the problem, I noticed that PulseAudio is installed and running. Pianoteq is configured to use an ALSA output directly. So I can just disable or uninstall PulseAudio, right?

Reply by groovy

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  • groovy
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  • Registered: 12-06-2009
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Re: Ubuntu Studio, PulseAudio, and a sample rate mismatch

Can't speak about Ubuntu, but on Debian the soundserver pulseaudio is removable. You can try a dry-run first:

# apt-get --simulate remove pulseaudio
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  gconf-service gconf2-common libgconf-2-4 libpulsedsp libwebrtc-audio-processing1 pulseaudio-utils rtkit
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libcanberra-pulse plasma-pa pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-gconf
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Remv libcanberra-pulse [0.30-3]
Remv plasma-pa [4:5.8.6-1]
Remv pulseaudio-module-gconf [10.0-1+deb9u1]
Remv pulseaudio [10.0-1+deb9u1]

But it is not necessary to remove pulseaudio. Just select "Direct hardware device without any conversions" in PTQ's Output to get direct alsa driver access.

After deinstalling pulseaudio just the selectable Output pulseaudio in PTQ disappears.

Whether pulseaudio is installed or not in the background makes no difference when I use ALSA directly on my system (latency stays the same).