[LAU] pulse/systemd - was: FreeBSD

[Philipp Überbacher]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2015 06:10:03 -0800 (PST)
Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Jan 2015, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> 
> > Why do you use PA as intermediate layer at all? You could just route
> > all alsa programs to jack. Alsa at least does what it should
> > instead of doing weird things on its own.
> 
> Just? Just routing all programs to alsa means each or any blocks all 
> others. One ends up with the mess that at least three audio servers
> have been tried of which Pulse seems to be the one that has been
> chosen

If I recall correctly it is possible to have a dmix-like loopback
device, or whatever it is called. So the chain for a program playing
back would be something like:
Program -> alsa userspace (loopback device, mixing of all alsa stuff)
-> jack -> alsa kernel space

No PA needed. Problematic may still be programs that demand exclusive
access to alsa (which they generally shouldn't) and programs that only
support PA (which they shouldn't either, IMHO).

I think I had something like that set up at one point, I'm sure the
information necessary is in some wiki or another.