For god fucking sake, PulseAudio, write a usable fucking documentation for your library and remove idiotic silent exit(1) calls and properly log what the fucking issue was

I'm tired of debugging this piece of bull shit for over a month now already while the pulse library occasionally crashes for no apparent reason

If anyone knows some open source audio player implementing PulseAudio, please send me the link to understand how to properly handle this bullshit

Poss VLC or Mplayer? Haven't checked but IK my OS was using that library to play audio from those applications.

Good luck 🫠

https://audacious-media-player.org/
https://github.com/audacious-media-...

Audacious is an audio only player that is the foobar2000 of Unix (but also runs on Windows) this should be more focused than the other media players mentioned.

@hjk101 yeah, reading the PulseAudio plugin for audacious. But there are seemingly missing parts in it, or I'm not understanding jack shit

What are you working on?

@retoor audio feedback. I have a set of WAV files which should be played when some events occur. And for reasons unknown at some attempts to play them the audio part crashes without much information on what exactly happened and why there was an abnormal termination

@iiii hmm, there must be simpler way to play notification sounds than implement pulse audio

Isn't pipewire the new shit, that also implements pulseaudio, jack, alsa, etc all in one?

@jonas-w there's no pipewire in the system.

@retoor if only I knew about it

I have a microphone that my Ubuntu OS doesn't recognise. The audio output sounds like its from the 60s radios.

@iiii I'm only a user, just glanced at the source for you. I don't know how much the plugin system is handling it if there is some dbus magic going on. Think that would be in the main repo (not the plug-in one).
I would not think that sending audio to pulse should be that hard.
If you can steal some more or the plugin system you can actually use all output plugins including pipewire if you would like.

Just read your username usecase. Are you sure you are feeding it valid data .wav does not have to be PCM data.

Perhaps libao might be interesting. Think it handles all the platform specific things and allows you to focus on just giving it the audio buffer.

@hjk101 yeah, I'm pretty sure the files are valid and correct.

And pipewire is not present in the system. It's an embedded Linux thing with very limited set of flexibility.

Run it through a debugger?

I asked "How to play wav files using pulse audio in c" to chatGPT and it gave a beautiful 5 step plan

@retoor is there a "kill yourself out of desperation"? 😂

@irene thanks!

@iiii are you too proud to ask chatGPT? Don't worry - the c code it produces many times have errors. A lot of fun stuff left to do

Exec aplayer?

Most pulseaudio setups route alsa into pulse as well.

@retoor I don't use chatGPT. Why should I?

in the worst case you could just invoke a

paplay /path/to/audio.ext

to play a sound on the currently active sound device. That's what i do for a startup sound.

funnily enough tho, im running pulse + alsa in my studio setup and never really had problems with it.

@thebiochemic but have you tried to implement the pulse API yourself instead of using ready solutions? That's the catch.

@iiii not pulseaudio, no. Luckily i always got around it, by just writing a bunch of .sh scripts.
But yeah, the silent fails were plaguing me there too. It's super annoying

once it was running, it was running tho

on another note, you could potentially take a look at the source of paplay, maybe you'll find something useful there (if not already done)