[pulseaudio-discuss] Loading module-null-sink when no real sinks found.

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

I've been running into some problems testing Mandriva One KDE 2008.1 RC1
(live CD).

I've been using VirtualBox and the default setup is to not include any
sound hardware, so when the system boots pulseaudio starts fine but
module-hal-detect (unsurprisingly) doesn't find anything and no sinks
are loaded.

This actually causes quite a few problems. pavucontrol seems to segv and
paplay has a stream error. Strangely after loading and then unloading
module-null-sink, things are less critical - e.g. pavucontrol runs fine...

As a side note, artd seems to crash repeatedly (seems to go on forever)
which IMO is a KDE session related bug but what I'm about to suggest
would inadvertently fix this too.



While I've been using virtualbox, this could be useful on any system
without built in sound (or if it's just disabled) to which you
subsequently plugin USB sound device. Sound could play to no where and
when a real device is plugged in all streams playing on the null sink
could be automatically moved over and null-sink removed. If/when the
real device is remmoved, we could load up module-null-sink.

module-rescue-streams could actually take care of the moving of streams
around so all we really need is a module to watch for when sinks are
added or removed and take appropriate action with regards to loading or
unloading module-null-sink etc.

What do you think, is this sensible?

Col


-- 

+--------------------------+
|      Colin Guthrie       |
+--------------------------+
| cguthrie(at)mandriva.org |
|  http://colin.guthr.ie/  |
+--------------------------+