[pulseaudio-tickets] [PulseAudio] #719: Pulseaudio interacts poorly with non-pulse apps

[PulseAudio]

#719: Pulseaudio interacts poorly with non-pulse apps
-----------------------+----------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  p-static  |       Owner:  lennart
      Type:  defect    |      Status:  new    
 Milestone:            |   Component:  daemon 
Resolution:            |    Keywords:         
-----------------------+----------------------------------------------------

Comment(by coling):

 If pulse cannot open your device there is not much we can do about it as
 pulse is predominantly a headless daemon. There is currently no official
 application that monitors the status of pulse and can report on this. I do
 have an experimental branch that implements a notifier module on X11 that
 could be used for this, but it's not really something I think we should be
 doing anyway.

 If an application on your desktop is configured to directly access your
 audio hardware then this is a problem for your distro to fix. Any distro
 worth its salt should configure the 'default' audio device to route via
 pulseaudio and any app that ignores this setting should be fixed. There
 are so many things that need to be setup correctly to ensure a proper
 sound stack and we can't really be guardians of all of those things.

 In the last couple years I've never had flash or pidgin (both of which
 generally run quite frequently on my system) ever hog the audio device, so
 I don't think this is a problem that should affect anyone on a properly
 configured system.

 Anyway, like I say the biggest problem with your suggestion is that pulse
 itself does not have a GUI and it thus has no way to "warn the user"
 clearly or otherwise. Until my notifier branch gets finished, I don't see
 a way of doing this in pulse itself.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://pulseaudio.org/ticket/719#comment:1>
PulseAudio <http://pulseaudio.org/>
The PulseAudio Sound Server