Is there a GUI tool that lets you really get at the guts of PulseAudio configuration? This has come up fairly recently for me as I was looking to get 7.1 surround virtualization on headphones working on Ubuntu (I did succeed at this).<p>The two tools I found - 'pavucontrol' seems like just a mixer, 'paprefs' doesn't show you anything about modules. I want something that shows me what PulseAudio modules are available to build a signal chain with, possibly also handling configuring LADSPA plugins in the chain. I was really surprised that there seemed to be no way to 'list all modules available for loading on the system' (there seems to be only 'list all modules already loaded' which means I needed to Google to find out what the possible modules are).<p>Is there something like this already? If not, I would actually be tempted to build something like this myself - I need a good excuse to learn Qt :)
A few years back I ditched Pulseaudio for regular Alsa and it's been a godsend. No more crackling audio on bluetooth devices, alsamixer which can set all the volume levels and every program just works out of the box.<p>The problem I have with Pulseaudio is that it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist. It's great you can mix and match any channel you want with Pulseaudio but that's mostly a theoretical advantage. For desktop users Alsa with dmix offers everything you need, I can play audio, record and mix all at the same time. The few programs which absolutely require Pulse (I'm looking at you Firefox) can be fixed with apulse, which emulates Pulseaudio through Alsa.
Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310465" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15310465</a>