[TwinQY]

  Just WOW. Over the years you've certainly been bangin' out fun AND experience! I have not yet started...any day now I suppose since the 17"er is just sittin' there. I guess I should get over gunking it up or brickin' it 'cause would it really matter? 

 Still need to decide what to try first. And wondering if I shouldn't have a hack at a flav of Unix first or Linux...maybe the former gets me to play around with my Mac under the hood in the future as well.

That's actually not a bad idea at all. Set up iTerm2 + Homebrew, play with some open source software (like mpv). It makes working on OS X very pleasurable. I highly enjoyed that workflow whenever I was stuck in front of a Mac every blue moon, and really, there's a big realm of *nix-y stuff opened up to you as a result.

 

[Silent One]

 
That's actually not a bad idea at all. Set up iTerm2 + Homebrew, play with some open source software (like mpv). It makes working on OS X very pleasurable. I highly enjoyed that workflow whenever I was stuck in front of a Mac every blue moon, and really, there's a big realm of *nix-y stuff opened up to you as a result.

Great! And always, thanks for looking in on me. Will have a look over the weekend while being domestic. Though, most of my weekend chores were completed by Friday night. Only laundry awaits which affords time to read up. 

 

[gopanthersgo1]

Oh what do you guys use for movies and videos, I use mpd for music and have been using mpv for movies but I don't know if there's anything else to use for movies that has better upscaling and stuff like mcp-hc or maybe less resource intensive cause I have a netbook and it'd be cool to be able to run bluray rips on it as it struggles with mpv, probably just a hardware issue though.

 

[Shelvo]

I use a multithreaded version of mplayer for movies, and vlc for everything else. It all runs fine on my 2006-ish laptop.

 

[gopanthersgo1]

I use a multithreaded version of mplayer for movies, and vlc for everything else. It all runs fine on my 2006-ish laptop.

I'll look into that the laptop is actually 2006 lol

 

[xsk3l3t0rx]

10 year ubuntu user here. wouldnt use any other OS again. i use win 7 at work, former mac user, linux is just so flexible and does everything i need it to without bloat. very customizable. clementine player ftw!!!

 

[Agahnim]

Hello everyone. I just posted in the introduction threads, and this is only the second day of my account. I am an avid Linux user, and student at Georgia Tech (I am switching to CS next semester from CompE) I have a pretty slick laptop running Arch Linux. I have used arch for a few years now and I love it. I am a little curious about how to rectify any audio problems that may or may not exist on my system. I just use pulse audio and different media players depending on what environment I am in. If I am in a tiling window manager I just use mpd and a console front end, but I am trying Plasma 5 for awhile, and to give it an honest try I am using Tomahawk since it looks nice and matches my setup well. If I wanted to get work done I wouldn't be using GUI applications XD. If anyone wants to see a bunch of screenshots from setups I have made I have an album on imgur. (most of the early screenshots are ugly and not very good)
 
http://igosduikana.imgur.com/all/
 
The latest one is my current Plasma 5 setup and is drastically different from my usual minimal interfaces.

 

[Agahnim]

oops I meant to reply to someone on the first page, sorry about that.
 

  Originally Posted by chickpea /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
I use W7 at work (unfortunately), but at home I have used Sabayon (derivative of Gentoo) since 2007.  God I love everything that is about linux and open source software.  It has really changed my life in terms of how I interact with computers.  There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING I can't fix on my computer.  I have done everything possible to break my linux installs over the years.  Needless to say, like most linux power users, the only application that is ALWAYS open is a terminal emulator.  Who knew how awesomely powerful they are?  *nix users that's who.  In fact, I am usually really pissed off if I need to do something in a GUI nowadays.  Scripting in the shell is just some much easier and faster.  
 
Transcode to flac?  just use flac on the command line.  flac [filename] boom, done.  flac /dir/* boom, batch processing done.
 
It just really doesn't get any better than linux.  Windows has gotten better, but man it still isn't even in the same league as linux for functionality

 

 
You just expressed my sentiments exactly XD, I am enjoying plasma 5 for what it is and I like to play around with different environments every once in awhile, but normally give me a minimal tiling WM (BSPWM) and a browser and a bunch of urxvt instances.

 

[Shelvo]

Hey, Agahnim, and welcome to the community!
 
If you want to improve audio quality on your Arch setup (I have done a bit of research into this myself in the past), my first piece of advice is this:
 
Ditch PulseAudio.
 
I'm serious. PulseAudio automatically downmixes everything to a lower-quality format. It is much harder to control. Back when I was a Linux n00b and used Ubuntu (thank goodness that only lasted a year before I switched to Arch) PulseAudio caused some major electronic noise during any sort of playback whatsoever. I thought something was wrong on the hardware side of things, but nope. It was PulseAudio. On top of all of that, I have found that it can be obnoxiously difficult to remove PulseAudio from a system.
 
The easiest and most practical option is probably to look into using plain ALSA. It just massively simplifies things. There used to be a page for "Audiophile Playback" on the wiki which gave some pretty good settings, but now it just redirects to the page for ALSA.
 
If you want to step things up to a professional level, look into using Jack.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit
 
At the end of the day, chances are that if you switch to plain ALSA you probably won't ever run into any (software-related) issues and you probably don't even need to do much configuration... but oh boy, some of the ALSA configs I have seen are fancy if you want to get into that sort of thing.

 

[Shelvo]

Also, if you want to see my setup, I made a post on the Arch Linux Google+ community about it a while ago. I've since fixed some issues though, so I'll do another post and link it here.
 
https://plus.google.com/107315390005978931013/posts/Mn6n2cLbbmd
 
Personally, I've never understood the allure of a tiling window manager. Maybe it's just because I don't have much screen real estate to work with, but who knows. Maybe someday I'll try it and I'll like it.

 

[Agahnim]

  Hey, Agahnim, and welcome to the community!
 
If you want to improve audio quality on your Arch setup (I have done a bit of research into this myself in the past), my first piece of advice is this:
 
Ditch PulseAudio.
 
I'm serious. PulseAudio automatically downmixes everything to a lower-quality format. It is much harder to control. Back when I was a Linux n00b and used Ubuntu (thank goodness that only lasted a year before I switched to Arch) PulseAudio caused some major electronic noise during any sort of playback whatsoever. I thought something was wrong on the hardware side of things, but nope. It was PulseAudio. On top of all of that, I have found that it can be obnoxiously difficult to remove PulseAudio from a system.
 
The easiest and most practical option is probably to look into using plain ALSA. It just massively simplifies things. There used to be a page for "Audiophile Playback" on the wiki which gave some pretty good settings, but now it just redirects to the page for ALSA.
 
If you want to step things up to a professional level, look into using Jack.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit
 
At the end of the day, chances are that if you switch to plain ALSA you probably won't ever run into any (software-related) issues and you probably don't even need to do much configuration... but oh boy, some of the ALSA configs I have seen are fancy if you want to get into that sort of thing.

Thanks a lot, I was actually using a pure alsa system for a long while. I can easily remove it. I have gone back and forth, due to trying applications that require it and such. I installed pulse for a reason a couple of months ago that I do not remember, I can never get my hdmi to output audio with alsa, which was one reason. I can go back to pure alsa easily though. Once of my good friends thought it was weird that I only used alsa, and kept badgering me to install pulse lol.

 

[Shelvo]

Glad I could help
I've found that most of the applications that require Pulse aren't really the type that an Arch user finds worthwhile anyway, so there's probably not much loss to you (especially if you can't remember why you installed it ).
 
As far as the HDMI sound not working, have you tried looking at this?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture/Troubleshooting#HDMI_Output_does_not_work
 
I will admit that Pulse is useful for some things, like controlling the audio input/output of each program individually, so I can see where your friend was coming from. Usually though, I find that I don't use those sorts of features anyway.

 

[Agahnim]

  Glad I could help
I've found that most of the applications that require Pulse aren't really the type that an Arch user finds worthwhile anyway, so there's probably not much loss to you (especially if you can't remember why you installed it ).
 
As far as the HDMI sound not working, have you tried looking at this?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture/Troubleshooting#HDMI_Output_does_not_work
 
I will admit that Pulse is useful for some things, like controlling the audio input/output of each program individually, so I can see where your friend was coming from. Usually though, I find that I don't use those sorts of features anyway.

Unfortunately, it seems that the reason I installed pulse is because my dac (ODAC/O2 amp) does not function without pulse installed. I can set it as the default device, and setting it as default control device works for alsamixer, but I cannot play audio to the device. There is probably a way to fix it, but I cannot figure it out from the wiki. I have tried using the card number and the card name as default pcm to no avail

 

[gopanthersgo1]

Yeah the thing that pissed me off the most was Skype needs pulse to run, not sure if it still does, but that's around the time I switched to windows for games. :| I have arch on a RPi2 model B right now, I love it lol.

 

[Agahnim]

Yeah the thing that pissed me off the most was Skype needs pulse to run, not sure if it still does, but that's around the time I switched to windows for games. :| I have arch on a RPi2 model B right now, I love it lol.

There is a little utility called apulse that tricks applications into thinking that they have access to pulseaudio when they do not. That was how I used skype with a pure alsa system. You simply run apulse skype for example, instead of just skype. The utility was actually written specifically for the skype issue.