[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH 1/2] allow-passthrough: Add module to allow passthrough streams always go through

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

> For various use-cases a passthrough stream should have priority over all
> other streams and get exclusive access to the sink regardless of whether
> any other streams are playing.
>
> An example use-case is ensuring XBMC can successfully start video
> playback (with passthrough) even if an external notification sound
> happened to be playing at the same time.

While the code makes sense, I am wondering if this is the right 
solution. This would typically need to be handled by a policy framework 
instead of making hard-coded decisions? what if you get a ringtone, do 
you really want to keep playing your video? At the very least there 
should be a whitelist set of stream types that have higher precedence 
than pass-through and that don't get routed to the null sink (could be 
passed as options to the module)
-Pierre