[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulseaudio as a systemwide deamon and as the default ALSA plugin doesn't seem to work right.... ?

[Nix]

On 17 Nov 2007, Kevin Williams stated:

> On November 16, 2007 07:59:35 pm Nix wrote:
>> Well it works for me without any of the problems you've mentioned.
>>
>> Which apps are you seeing this behaviour with? How are they talking to
>> the sound system? (ALSA, OSS, native PulseAudio...)
>
> Well, the way I've setup is launch pulseaudio as the systemwide daemon with 
> alsa-sink module while ALSA is configured  to use pulseaudio as the default 
> driver. 

Likewise, only alsa-sink isn't working for me so it's defaulting to oss-sink.
(But it used to work with alsa-sink.)

> The above setup works perfectly well, if I stop using pulseaudio and leaving 
> alsa as the only audio server. With pulseaudio as the system daemon the 
> earlier mentioned problmes start to appear. Almost all the apps complain 
> about the audio device being not available.  Amarok also, complains the same 
> but, at times it doesn't and there's no sound output though, I can see that 
> the file is being played.

Just checking here: if you set up /etc/asound.conf to use device pulse
by default, and set up PulseAudio to use alsa without specifying a different
device, I suspect you'll get an infinite regression. :)

Personally I've set up alsa to use pulse in my ~/.asound.conf, and left the
systemwide one alone: that seems to work.

> I've just setup pulseaudio to launch as per user instance and quite 
> surprisingly (or may be not ?), all the apps are working just perfect ! :-)

Weird. My explanation must be wrong, then, but I don't know what the real
explanation might be.

-- 
`Some people don't think performance issues are "real bugs", and I think 
such people shouldn't be allowed to program.' --- Linus Torvalds