UDS-Maverick recap

UDS-M is bittersweet. It is the last summit I attend due to additional work commitments that will remove me from Ubuntu development, but more significantly it is the first summit where the future gardeners, maintainers, and developers of the audio infrastructure in Ubuntu and derivatives gathered and discussed how we can drive user experience improvements. In fact, the phenomenal Amber Graner asked me a few questions to that end, and a few things that I neglected to mention are that:

* Canonical has some real rock stars ramping up enablement and proactive quirking efforts on the ALSA front, so Linux distributions will see significant improvement in vendor support for audio in the 12.04 LTS time frame;

* we might see a streamlined method of switching between PulseAudio and JACK via indicator-sound on the Ubuntu desktop;

* Maverick will see the complete removal of native OSS support from our linux packages with OSS proxy being used instead.

As always, we'll continue to apply stable release updates to supported releases (particularly the most current LTS), to address high profile bug reports against the audio stack, and to maintain helpful presences on the varied mailing lists.

It has been one heck of a five-year ride. Thanks for all the fish.

Public service announcement: Read the original bug reporter's summary before adding unrelated comments

I find that I'm wasting considerable time trawling through bug reports where comments not from the original reporter indicate experiences involving very different software configurations. For instance, person A files a bug against pulseaudio on default Ubuntu, and you see very similar symptoms on default Kubuntu and thus proceed to add some comments to the bug report.

File a separate bug.

The bug reporter's symptoms don't involve Phonon at all, but yours do. You've just splattered over an otherwise useful timeline, which generally makes me want to take a long springtime walk instead of fixing the actual bug. Thanks for understanding.

Public service announcement: When in doubt, don't splatter your apport info into an existing ALSA bug report

Folks -

Please, please don't apport-collect -p alsa-base foo (or apport-collect foo in 10.04 LTS) into a bug report that you didn't file unless a member of the audio dev team explicitly requests it. What we end up with are reports that start from the original reporter as "my laptop's internal mic doesn't work" and end with dozens of unrelated comments from other people along the lines of "my laptop's internal speakers are too loud".

Here's the gist: your symptoms may be eerily similar, but your audio hardware often is quite different, which means that resolving the original reporter's bug symptoms should only affect that reporter's hardware. Of course, if you have identical hardware, then your symptoms will be resolved in your own bug report, too. If you didn't file the original bug report, please just file a new one. Thanks for understanding.

2010 Census awareness

Have you mailed your completed 2010 Census form yet?

Pre-Year of the Tiger

Firstly, lots happening on the Ubuntu 10.04 audio front:

* daily builds of stable alsa-driver snapshots (thanks, Brad!);
* massive alsa-lib and alsa-plugins debugging (thanks, David!);
* continued alsa-driver/linux quirking;
* uploads of latest stable alsa*, libsdl1.2 (including direct seeding of the pulse backend in the Ubuntu desktop seed), openal-soft, and pulseaudio source packages;
* re-addition of HDA power down for Sigmatel/IDT in pm-utils-powersave-policy 0.3.

Some very positive Canonical goings-on have occurred, too, but that's the purvey of others. Also importantly, fellow community members are stepping forward to help triage Ubuntu audio bugs. You gals/guys are too numerous to list individually, but rest assured that your efforts (even if you're new to bug triaging!) are much appreciated. Thanks for helping make Lucid rock!

Secondly, John Poelstra recently wrote a fantastic piece on chairing effective meetings. The points are so entirely lucid (bad pun I know) that I can't believe that I hadn't used them!

In fact, the revitalized DistrictOfColumbia LoCo team meetings have begun using them. Brian has been doing a bang-up job posting summaries in lieu of a configured mootbot to keep us accountable. Members of the LoCo team are working on a screencast/video to demonstrate archive-uploadable activities at jams using Bug Hugger, Lernid, and Ground Control. I'll be doing a portion on fixing alsa-driver/linux bugs.

Heads up: powerdown changes to alsa-base in Lucid/10.04

If you don't normally follow the Ubuntu development lists, it's a good time to begin. Yesterday I uploaded alsa-driver 1.0.22.1 to Lucid which, among other things, contains my extensions to power down various parts of the HDA controller and codec after a configurable idle period. Work is far from complete, and I could use your help to make sure your sound hardware is well-supported in 10.10.

In summary:
"Just to clarify in case it's not already obvious: my having uploaded alsa-driver 1.0.22.1 in no way affects the default Lucid install of the kernelspace ALSA driver (aka alsa-kernel). It remains 1.0.21. Anyone wishing to build modules of 1.0.22.1 can do so using module-assistant and alsa-source. And, until Takashi returns, that approach will be more current than using the daily snap from the 27 Dec.

So, the current state of Lucid contains:
alsa-kernel 1.0.21 (as shipped in linux 2.6.32-9.13-generic)
alsa-lib 1.0.22 + Fix-S24_3LE-softvol-distortion.patch (bdf80)
alsa-plugins 1.0.22"

Lucid development: audio for Alpha 1

Things that won't land for Lucid Alpha 1:

Steady progress on Analog Devices HDA suspend/resume additions/fixes in pursuit of powerdown objectives;

Fix for PulseAudio bailing on HDA softmodems.

On the other hand, they will land sometime soonish. In fact, the latter fix is available for testing in Karmic from the ubuntu-audio-dev PPA.

(As always, thanks for understanding that I have a limited amount of free time to do this stuff.)