Hello Alan_g . Thank you for this new snap on CORE. We are switching to it as we build an app on core, but were having the hardest time trying to hear the audio. Does ubuntu-frame or the older mir-kiosk have an audio-playback plug? We try to connect to it and it says it does not exist so we never have audio. The only workaround was to install pulseaudio and force connect our app audio to that.
Is ubuntu-frame going to have audio support soon?
Also many motherboards have built in sound cards with audio out, but we all use HDMI to get the video/audio out to a TV. Will that be supported on ubuntu-frame as well for HDMI audio out?
There is no reason for Ubuntu Frame to provide audio support, Frame provides a graphical shell and that can be done with just the wayland slot. As you observe, there is another snap that independently provides audio-playback support, this demonstrates that there is no need for integration into Frame.
I don’t think the pulseaudio snap is actively maintained or supported as the original developers no longer have a need for it. However, if it doesn’t meet your needs, remember it is free software.
I believe another alternative is to include the audio stack in your own snap, but I’ve no experience of this to suggest what is involved (but looking at the pulseaudio snap recipe would likely be informative).
If you want something more modern than pulseaudio 8.0, i’m playing with a package using the latest upstream of alsa (1.2.5 currently) and pulse (v15.0) here:
Thank you Ogra! Yes… I was going to ask what’s the best replacement for the old v8 snap of ‘Pulseaudio’ that’s in the snapcraft store. Is this the recommended solution and should we try to integrate pulse-server into our snap apps or wait for a SNAP for pulse-server? Is there anything that is officially supported by Ubuntu CORE for audio as a snap?
Correct me if I’m wrong Ogra, but I’m assuming you’re a Canonical employee; and if that’s the case I’d just like to ask if you’d consider making a request to claim write/push access to the pulseaudio snap if your experiments are successful and assuming it was a clean transition that wouldn’t break people.
From the perspective of someone pretty heavily invested in the Snap ecosystem but also fairly distant from the Ubuntu Core side of things, there’s a lot of documentation out there that just becomes incredibly stale overtime, as snaps are deprecated, processes changes, and the environment changes.
As far as reasonably possible, I think it’s probably in the greater interest to fix the state of the pulseaudio snap rather than have a completely seperate snap. Of course it might not be possible and the seperation might be the only practical approach, but I think it’s really worth avoiding duplicity of similar snaps in important roles in the ecosystem. It’s really hard to follow from an outsider perspective!
Otherwise you end up with scenarios like this (which isn’t a jab on the Ubuntu Frame & Mir at all, but I do find it unfortunate that this creates, for example, wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk that works better with ubuntu-frame than actually with mir-kiosk. In terms of documentation, it’s best avoided where possible)