[pulseaudio-discuss] idea: a reserve alsa plugin

[Arun Raghavan]

On Thu, 2013-05-02 at 12:55 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> Just had an idea which I'll write down here before I forget it 
> again...and I'm not saying I'll implement this anytime soon either, but 
> here goes:
> 
> There is a device reserve protocol between PulseAudio and JACK2 - when 
> JACK needs the sound card, it'll send a dbus message to PulseAudio and 
> grab a name in D-Bus.
> 
> However, there are plenty of applications who like to access ALSA 
> directly, without going through JACK2 or PulseAudio. By making a 
> "reserve" plugin, we could have this functionality for those apps too.
> 
> In practice, if the app usually opens "plughw:0" or "hw:0", it could 
> instead open "reserve:plughw:0" or "reserve:hw:0" to also reserve the 
> device from PulseAudio usage while the device is open. Meanwhile, 
> PulseAudio is free to use other audio devices (which is not the case 
> when using e g pasuspender).
> 
> How does that sound?

Might be neat to do have desktops set up to do this whenever an ALSA
device is opened (that is do it unconditionally when hw:X or plughw:X is
opened).

-- Arun