Monday, November 2, 2009

Sound works!

I am only an average user of Linux, and hence I pick and use Ubuntu. There are few things I found troublesome in using Linux and they are:
  • video - it is painful to use VESA driver as it makes every slow. It really hurts the first impression!
  • sound - well, it works, but the sound control is a mess! For instance, there is a slider for main volume, but it doesn't work. You need to use the PCM slider to get things work.
  • FLAC + CUE
I am happy to report that the last two has definitely be rectified in the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10. I now can use Audicious to listen to CUE+FLAC archive I have. It was a bit of a joke before, FLAC is a very popular format for audio, but the support for cue+flac is almost not existing. In fact, many has resorted to using foobar2k under WINE.

Also, sound control has finally got the polish it needed! There is a slider, and a slider works!

Just for these features alone, Ubuntu 9.10 is a worthy upgrade!

1 comment:

Garfield said...

I should change the title to almost work. I have this computer which has an internal speaker. Another day, when I try to use my headset for Skype, I found the should from the headphone jack is mono only despite the settings I used in the GUI setting tool.

I guess I can tweak my configuration files, but why should I? I don't mind to tweak a few things here and there for unusual devices, but for basics such Video and Sound, I true believe it should be configurated through single graphics interface rather than nasty scripts!

I guess, I speak too soon, there is still a lot of work need to be done on Linux on basic things such as Video and Sound to make it a good alternative to none-technical mines.