[pulseaudio-discuss] Trying to get Pukseaudio playing nice with KDE 4.6 on Arch Linux

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Gene Kodadek at 14/02/11 16:21 did gyre and gimble:
> The result of this setup is that I have sound only when Jack is running, which 
> is not exactly what I had in mind. What I want to achieve here is to have 
> Pulseaudio off under ordinary circumstances, and only start when Jack is 
> running.

Really what should happen is that PA should run all the time.

Initially jack is not running as the machine is presumably not a
sole-purpose audio-dev machine seeing as you mention the "only when jack
is running" case which implies it sometimes does not run. This means
module-udev-detect should detect and load module-alsa-card for you and
subsequently give you direct access to ALSA sinks/sources.

When Jack runs, it should request access to the devices via dbus (PA and
Jack cooperate an 'device reservation protocol' that allows jack to ask
for the device at which point PA will grant access).

At this point a special module (git master only) called
module-jackdbus-detect will detect that jack is running and
automatically load module-jack-sink and friends for you.

Sadly this isn't 100% working just yet. PA "suspends" the alsa sinks
when it hands over to Jack rather than unloading them totally. This
means active streams (and even new ones) are not failed over to the new
jack sinks. This isn't ideal.

More work is needed in the various PA modules and core to make this 100%
smooth.

All the best

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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