Last month I did mostly reviews again. One of the patch sets was the addition of the aptX codec support to PulseAudio’s bluetooth modules. There was a fair bit of discussion of how to deal with the codec. AptX has been marketed as better than SBC. SBC is the basic codec used with the A2DP bluetooth profile, and so far the only codec that PulseAudio supports. However, in his subjective tests Pali Rohár (the patch author) hadn’t noticed improvement in the audio quality, and there’s also some research suggesting that aptX isn’t really better than SBC when SBC is used with similar bitrates as aptX. SBC supports dynamically adjusting the bitrate in case the radio link isn’t good enough to carry high bitrates, which makes the comparison more complicated. AptX has a fixed bitrate. Will PulseAudio get aptX support soon? I don’t know. The first version of the patches isn’t ready for merging, and I’m not sure if Pali has motivation to work on the patches further, given that aptX turned out not to be that great after all.
Other reviewed patches include (in addition to some smaller patches):
- a patch for supporting elogind, which provides the login daemon from systemd as a standalone package that doesn’t depend on the init system from systemd
- tests for PulseAudio’s passthrough functionality
The recent migration to GitLab continued to cause some work: I updated some documentation in paprefs and in the wiki to point to GitLab instead of the old systems. The wiki changes aren’t entirely ready yet, and I haven’t pushed out the changes that I have done so far, so the wiki still has outdated information in many places. Another thing is that the review workflow with GitLab’s “merge requests” is quite different from the old email based system, and some aspects of reviewing are more difficult with GitLab. I made a couple of scripts that make it easier to download the merge requests to a local git repository, and to put merge request updates to separate branches for comparing what was changed between versions.
One noteworthy thing was that Arun Raghavan proposed a code of conduct document for PulseAudio. It’s the same “Contributor Covenant” that has been adopted by freedesktop.org and the Linux kernel, among many others. There was no opposition to the proposal, so it was swiftly accepted.
This post was originally written on 2018-10-06, and first made available to my Patreon supporters. Speaking of Patreon – I’m using crowdfunding in an attempt to make it financially sustainable to continue my volunteer work as a PulseAudio maintainer. If you’d like to help, check out my Patreon page (or Liberapay).
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