[LAU] PulseAudio and Alsa

[Nigel Henry]

On Wednesday 08 October 2008 15:12, Stephen Doonan wrote:
> Juhana Sadeharju wrote:
> > What is ESD in Preferences/Sound?
>
> A few non-expert, ordinary-user comments--
>
> ESD is the "Enlightened Sound Daemon," I'm guessing Gnome's equivalent
> of KDE's aRts sound server. I personally don't like these
> desktop-environment sound servers so I turn them off using the
> preferences and system control-panel tools of Gnome or KDE and rely on
> ALSA and JACK instead.
>
> But regarding ESD, when PulseAudio is installed it installs an "ESD
> replacement" script that activates PulseAudio instead of ESD when ESD
> would normally be activated. So the "Enable software sound mixing (ESD)"
> checkbox in Sound Preferences in Gnome really probably turns PulseAudio
> on instead of ESD.
>
> So now for me there are 3 things to turn off regarding sound: aRts, ESD
> and PulseAudio.
>
> PulseAudio tries I guess to be a comprehensive solution to audio that
> would replace aRts and ESD at some point. But to me, at this point in
> time, it seems to create more problems than solutions.
>
> -Steve

To disable Pulseaudio, so that all your audio apps use Alsa directly, you can 
remove the package alsa-plugins-pulseaudio. This will also remove the package 
kde-settings-pulseaudio if you, as I am, are using KDE. If you have audio 
apps that use SDL, you can also add this line to ~/.bashrc, which will remove 
the hack that SDL programs needed, to use Pulseaudio. See below.

unset SDL_AUDIODRIVER

2¢ worth of perhaps nothing.

Nigel.

btw Stephen. Any new tunes in progress?