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

[Gene Kodadek]

On Monday, February 14, 2011 04:44:52 PM Colin Guthrie wrote:
> '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

I would consider PA running all the time to be an acceptable solution except 
for one thing: as it sits right now, I only have sound when Jack is running.