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

[Ng Oon-Ee]

On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 22:47 +0200, Christoph Groth wrote:
> 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
> 
Basically, no, the sound-card cannot be shared that way. Perhaps if you
use dmix, but apps which use mmap don't play well with that either I
think.