[pulseaudio-discuss] accessing native ALSA directly while pulseaudio is running

[Christoph Groth]

Hello,

Since a few weeks I'm running pulseaudio on my machines and it works
nicely.  I especially like the ability to send audio though the
network.

However, I need to run a program (aeolus) which works with plain ALSA
but not with pulseaudio's ALSA emulation (It complains that "the
playback interface doesn't support mmap-based access").  I had set up
/etc/asound.conf to default to pulse as recommended.

Now I wonder, is it possible to have some applications accessing the
native ALSA device while pulseaudio is running?  I would have imagined
that something like this would work:

ALSA_CARD=NVidia aeolus -A

but it doesn't.  I get the "mmap-based access" error.

Also killing pulseaudio doesn't help, as it is restarted when a program
is trying to access ALSA.  A solution would be to modify
/etc/asound.conf (or it's user-local equivalent), kill pulseaudio, and
then run the program, but this is very inconvenient.

Any ideas?

thanks,
Christoph