Like many, I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of LLMs on the free software community. In the GNOME community, there have been a couple of posts on Planet GNOME and Discourse, and assorted heated discussions on Matrix and Mastodon. We…
(these notes are being posted in two parts to make the length more manageable, part 1 is here) Continuing from where we left off, about topics discussed at the PipeWire hackfest in Nice… DSP features We discussed a number of features relate…
(these notes are being posted in two parts to make the length more manageable, part 2 is here) The PipeWire community organised a hackfest in Nice, France, colocated with Embedded Recipes, the GStreamer hackfest, and a number of other event…
If you maintain a Linux audio settings component, we now have a way to globally enable/disable mono audio for users who do not want stereo separation of their audio (for example, due to hearing loss in one ear). Read on for the details on h…
In case you missed it, the GStreamer Conference 2025 videos are up! This includes my talk on the new PipeWire native Rust bindings. You’ll want to skip the first 1:20 to get to the start. I talk a little bit about the motivation and structu…
Asymptotic was started 6 years ago, when I wanted to build something that would be larger than just myself. We’ve worked with some incredible clients in this time, on a wide range of projects. I would be remiss to not thank all the teams th…
It should be surprising to absolutely nobody that the Linux audio stack is often the subject of varying levels of negative feedback, ranging from drive-by meme snark to apoplectic rage[1]. A lot of what computers are used for today involves…
In my previous post, I alluded to an exciting development for PipeWire. I’m now thrilled to officially announce that Asymptotic will be undertaking several important tasks for the project, thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund (now…
It’s 2025(!), and I thought I’d kick off the year with a post about some work that we’ve been doing behind the scenes for a while. Grab a cup of $beverage_of_choice, and let’s jump in with some context. History: Hearing aids and Bluetooth V…
I wrote about our time at the GStreamer Conference in October, and one important thing I was able to do is spend some time with all-around great guy George reflecting on where the GStreamer plugins for PipeWire are, and what we need to do t…
All of us at Asymptotic are back home from the exciting week at GStreamer Conference 2024 in Montréal, Canada last month. It was great to hang out with the community and see all the great work going on in the GStreamer ecosystem. Montréal…
The WebRTC nerds among us will remember the first thing we learn about WebRTC, which is that it is a specification for peer-to-peer communication of media and data, but it does not specify how signalling is done. Or put more simply, if you …
It’s been a busy few several months, but now that we have some breathing room, I wanted to take stock of what we have done over the last year or so. This is a good thing for most people and companies to do of course, but being a scrappy, (q…
(well, not exactly everywhere …) This is not an easy post for me to write, being a bit of a criticism / “you can do better” note for organisers of conferences that cater to a global community. It’s not easy because most of the conferences I…
For the last year and a half, we at Asymptotic have been working with the excellent team at Daily. I’d like to share a little bit about what we’ve learned. Daily is a real time calling platform as a service. One standard feature that users …
As the third and final day of the PipeWire hackfest draws to a close, I thought I’d summarise some of my thoughts on the goings-on and the future. Thanks Before I get into the details, I want to send out a big thank you to: Christian Schal…
PSA: This post has a bunch of Haskell code, but I’m going to try to make it more broadly accessible. Let’s see how that goes. I’ve been proceeding apace with my 3rd year in Abhinav’s Haskell classes at Nilenso, and we just got done with the…
It’s been a little over a month since I got back from Manchester, and this post should’ve come out earlier but I’ve been swamped. The conference was absolutely lovely, the organisation was a 110% on point (serious kudos, I know first hand h…
I’ve been having fun recently, writing a RESTful service using Haskell and Servant. I did run into a problem that I couldn’t easily find a solution to on the magical bounty of knowledge that is the Internet, so I thought I’d share my findin…
I’ve written a bit in my last two blog posts about the work I’ve been doing in inter-device synchronised playback using GStreamer. I introduced the library and then demonstrated its use in building video walls. The important thing in synchr…
Hello again, and I hope you’re having a pleasant end of the year (if you are, maybe don’t check the news until next year). I’d written about synchronised playback with GStreamer a little while ago, and work on that has been continuing apace…
A lesser known, but particularly powerful feature of GStreamer is our ability to play media synchronised across devices with fairly good accuracy. The way things stand right now, though, achieving this requires some amount of fiddling and a…
This is a quick PSA for those of you using the GStreamer binary builds for Android. With the Android NDK r12, the default behaviour while building native code changed from building for armeabi to building for all ABIs. So if your app doesn’…
In case you missed it – we got PulseAudio 9.0 out the door, with the echo cancellation improvements that I wrote about. Now is probably a good time for me to make good on my promise to expand upon the subject of beamforming. As with the las…
As we approach the PulseAudio 9.0 release, I thought it would be a good time to talk about one of the things I had a chance to work on, that landed in this cycle. Old-time readers will remember the work I had done in the past on echo cancel…
This one’s going to be a bit of a long post. You might want to grab a cup of coffee before you jump in! Over the last few years, I’ve spent some time getting PulseAudio up and running on a few Android-based phones. There was the initial Gal…
Happy 2016 everyone! While I did mention a while back (almost two years ago, wow) that I was taking a break, I realised recently that I hadn’t posted an update from when I started again. For the last year and a half, I’ve been providing fre…
We just rolled out a minor bugfix release. Quick changelog: Fix a crasher when using srbchannel Fix a build system typo that caused symlinks to turn up in / Make Xonar cards work better Other minor bug fixes and improvements More details …
I know it’s been ages, but I am now working on updating the webrtc-audio-processing library. You might remember this as the code that we split off from the webrtc.org code to use in the PulseAudio echo cancellation module. This is basically…
This one’s a bit late, for reasons that’ll be clear enough later in this post. I had the happy opportunity to go to GUADEC in Gothenburg this year (after missing the last two, unfortunately). It was a great, well-organised event, and I felt…
I was in Depok, Indonesia last week to speak at GNOME Asia 2015. It was a great experience – the organisers did a fantastic job and as a bonus, the venue was incredibly pretty! View from our room My talk was about the GNOME audio stack, …
This might be a well-known trick already, but just in case it’s not… Reviewing a patch can be a bit painful when a file that has been changed and moved or renamed at one go (and there can be perfectly valid reasons for doing this). A nice t…
The third week of October was quite action-packed, with a whole bunch of conferences happening in Düsseldorf. The Linux audio developer community as well as the PulseAudio developers each had a whole day of discussions related to a wide ran…
Update: gst-build is the current way to build GStreamer for developement. I’m leaving the post up for posterity, but other than the note on getting dependencies, you should not be using this. One of the first tools that you should get if yo…
Some of you might have been following all the brouhaha over Popcorn Time. I won’t get into the arguments that can be made for and against at the moment. While poking around at what it was that Popcorn Time was doing, I stumbled upon peerfli…
Last weekend, I was at the GStreamer Hackfest in Munich. As usual, it was a blast – we got much done, and it was a pleasure to meet the fine folks who bring you your favourite multimedia framework again. Thanks to the conference for providi…
Four years and what seems like a lifetime ago, I jumped aboard the ship Collabora Multimedia, and set sail for adventure and lands unknown. We sailed through strange new seas, to exotic lands, defeated many monsters, and, I feel, had some p…
Dear Future Me, I know you’ve hit that point again. You’re about to buy a few books, you’re this close to hitting “Buy”, but you keep thinking – there must be a better way! You ran out of space on the shelves a while back. The books are sta…
This is a public service announcement for packagers and users of Skype and PulseAudio 4.0. In PulseAudio 4.0, we added some code to allow us to deal with automatic latency adjustment more gracefully, particularly for latency requests under …
And we’re back … PulseAudio 4.0 is out! There’s both a short and super-detailed changelog in the release notes. For the lazy, this release brings a bunch of Bluetooth stability updates, better low latency handling, performance improvements,…
That’s right – PulseAudio will be participating in the Google Summer of Code again this year! We had a great set of students and projects last year, and you’ve already seen some their work in the last release. There are some more details on…
Yay, we just released PulseAudio 3.0! I’m not going to rehash the changelog that you can find in the release announcement as well as the longer release notes. I would like to thank the 36 contributors over the last 6 months who have made th…
For those of you who missed my previous updates, we recently organised a PulseAudio miniconference in Copenhagen, Denmark last week. The organisation of all this was spearheaded by ALSA and PulseAudio hacker, David Henningsson. The good fol…
This problem seems to bite some of our hardened users a couple of times a year, so thought I’d blog about it. If you are using grsec and PulseAudio, you must not enable CONFIG_GRKERNSEC_SYSFS_RESTRICT in your kernel, else autodetection of y…
David has now published a tentative schedule for the PulseAudio Mini-conference (I’m just going to call it PulseConf – so much easier on the tongue). For the lazy, these are some of the topics we’ll be covering: Vision and mission – where …
For those of you who missed it, your friendly neighbourhood PulseAudio hackers are converging on Copenhagen in a month to discuss, plan and hack on the future of PulseAudio. We’re doing this for the first time, so I’m super-excited! David h…
That’s right, it’s finally out! Thanks go out to all our contributors for the great work (there’s too many – see the shortlog!). The highlights of the release follow. Head over to the announcement or release notes for more details. Dynami…
Derek Foreman has finally written up a nice blog post about his Androgenizer tool, which we’ve used for porting PulseAudio, GStreamer, Wayland, Telepathy and most of their dependencies to Android. If you’ve got an autotools-based project th…
Some of you might’ve noticed that there has been a bunch of work happening here at Collabora on making cool open source technologies such as GStreamer, Telepathy, Wayland and of course, PulseAudio available on Android. Since my last blog po…
If you’re a student participating in this year’s edition of Google Summer of Code and want to get your hands dirty with some fun low-level hacking, here’s a quick reminder that PulseAudio is a participating organisation for the first time, …
Most of you have no doubt already seen that Mozilla will be changing their position on H.264 support for HTML5 video in future releases. This is an extremely important decision that I’ve been hoping to see for a while now, and I am really g…
For a long time now, fellow-Gentoo’ers have had to edit /etc/asound.conf or ~/.asoundrc to make programs that talk directly to ALSA go through PulseAudio. Most other distributions ship configuration that automatically probes to see if Pulse…
I’ve been meaning to try this for a while, and we’ve heard a number of requests from the community as well. Recently, I got some time here at Collabora to give it a go – that is, to get PulseAudio running on an Android device and see how it…
For those of you who were interested but couldn’t make it to the GStreamer Conference this year, the cool folks at Ubicast have got the talk videos up (can be streamed or downloaded). Among these is my talk about recent developments in the …
Longish day, but I did want to post something fun before going to sleep – I just pushed out patches to hook up the WebRTC folks’ analog gain control to PulseAudio. So your mic will automatically adjust the input level based on how loud you’…
As I’d blogged about last week, we had a couple of Audio BoF sessions last week. Here’s a summary of what was discussed. I’ve collected items in relevance order rather than chronological order to make for easier reading. I think I have ever…
For those who are in Prague for GstConf, LinuxCon, ELCE, etc. – don’t forget we’ve a couple of interesting audio-related things happening: Today (Tuesday), at 4 pm, I’ll be talking about recent developments in PulseAudio Tomorrow (Wednesda…
Yep, if we keep this up, it could even become a habit! PulseAudio 1.1 is out. It’s mostly a bunch of bug fixes on top of 1.0. Most important of these are fixes for: a libpulse dependency on libsamplerate (if enabled) which would make our LG…
I’ve just pushed a bunch of patches by Pierre-Louis Bossart that can have a pretty decent CPU/power impact. These introduce the concept of an “alternate sample rate”. Currently, PulseAudio runs all your devices at a default sample rate, whi…
Prague is an interesting place to be at this time of the year – next week it’s playing host to the Real Time Linux Workshop. The week after that, we have the Kernel Summit, GStreamer Conference, Embedded Linux Conference Europe and LinuxCon…
As Colin Guthrie reports, PulseAudio 1.0 is now out the door! There’s a lot of new things in the release, and we should be getting a much more regular release schedule going. Head over to the full release notes for more details. A lot of pe…
In an unsurprising turn of events, Adobe completely fails to play well with modern Linux systems. Well done, guys. Well done, indeed. p.s.: I was quite happy to see that the Google Talk plugin has proper PulseAudio support (thanks to the We…
I’m going to be at the Linux Plumbers’ Conference next week, speaking about the things we’ve been doing to make passthrough audio on Linux kick ass. If you’re around and interested, do drop by!
I have a secret to confess. I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few months talking to myself. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed it – it turns out my capacity to entertain myself is far greater than initially suspected. But I hear you …
I’m in Berlin at the Desktop Summit, so you can drop me a note and we can meet if you want to yell about PulseAudio things that annoy you (or even, y’know, things you like).
[tl;dr — if you’re using GNOME or a GStreamer-based player, not using the Rhythmbox crossfading backend, and want to try to save ~0.5 W of power, jump to end of the post] Lennart pointed to another blog post about actually putting PulseAudi…
Just a quick (and late!) heads-up for all of you who missed it – the GNOME Asia Summit 2011 is happening in Bangalore this week, with a bunch of really cool people doing hackfests through the week, and whole bunch of talks on Saturday and S…
If you find yourself saying tl;dr very often, you should probably stop reading now. Madhu, being the awesome cousin that she is, sent me Books v. Cigarettes, a while ago. It’s an anthology of assorted George Orwell articles and musings, amo…
Richard Hughes recently posted about the recent GNOME3 Power Settings design that got a lot of people (myself included) hot and bothered. As I said in my comment, I think that a lot of people prefer that their laptop stay on when the lid is…
When it comes to books I’m really old school. Starting from the pleasure of discovering a book you’ve been dying to find, nestled between two otherwise forgettable books in the store, to the crinkling goodness of a new book, the reflexive c…
Things have been awfully quiet since Zeeshan’s posted about the work we’ve been doing on DLNA support in Rygel. Since I’ve released GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0, I thought this is a good time to explain what we’ve been up to. This is also a sort of exp…
Hopefully that title was provocative enough. ;) No, GUADEC seemed to be a smashing success. If only I had been able to attend instead of lying in bed for 2 days, ill and wondering at the general malignancy of a Universe that would do this t…
I finally got tired of how slow NearlyFreeSpeech.net is (it’s still a fantastically affordable service - you get what you pay for and more), and moved to a Linode. Setup and migration was dead simple, and I’m really happy with the instance …
My company was really kind to get me a Macbook Pro (the 13.3-inch “5.5” variant). It is an awesome piece of hardware! (especially after my own PoS HP laptop I’ve been cussing at for a while now) That said, I still don’t like the idea of run…
Three days left to the event I helped start 3 years ago. That’s right, folks, FOSSKriti ’10 is here! We started this event in 2008 because there was a huge gap between the open source world and academia in India. The aim was to expose enthu…
My exploits at Collabora Multimedia currently involve a brief detour into hacking on Rygel, specifically improving the DLNA profile name guessing. We wanted to use Edward’s work on GstDiscoverer work, and Rygel is written in Vala, so the fi…
It’s been long since I wrote about anything non-specific. I guess it’s a common symptom amongst bloggers from my generation (age jokes will draw ire). For me, it just stopped being so important to say anything, what with every major insight…
Yes, yes, I know this post is a tad late, but hey, it’s still the right year. ;) As Srini had announced, Dec 5th was GNOME Day at FOSS.IN this year. We kicked the day off with Shreyas giving a developer’s introduction to GNOME 3.0. This was…
Yesterday was my last day at NVidia. I’ve worked with the Embedded Software team there for the last 15 months, specifically on the system software for a Linux based stack that you will see some time next year. I’ve had a great time there, l…
I’ve been terrible about it, but here’s the big update – I just got back today after spending the last week at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, location of the first co-located GUADEC and aKademy. It’s been amazing, and I don’t know where t…
I feel old a lot, these days. It’s been about 17 years since I first sat in front of a computer (and, soon after, realised I’d be sitting in front of them for a very long time to come). It’s been about 11 years since I intrepidly stuck in a…
Thought I’d outline a bit of what I did to get all my posts and tags migrated from LiveJournal to WordPress 2.7.1. Note that this information will be redundant soon enough – there’s much better LJ import support in the latest WordPress trun…
So this is my first actual post on this blog. I’ve imported the history from my LiveJournal blog – starting on a blank slate was just too strange. I’ll post about how the import was done tomorrow, but it was only slightly painful, and shoul…