On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 8:17 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons@linuxaudio.org> wrote:

On Sat, Jun 02, 2018 at 07:44:39AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> The Pulse audio API was never intended to be used by applications.

Then why does it exist ? :-) The API doesn't look worse
than ALSA's user space 'plug' mess which never worked
well except in some simple cases (try stacking a few
'plugs' and keep the result stable).

There's a lot to the Pulse API that doesn't overlap with ALSA at all, and is used by Pulse-centric utility applications. Network routing, application volume control, device switching and more.

Pulse includes an audio I/O API mostly for completeness and testing; that doesn't mean it was intended for use by other applications (and indeed, it was not).

BTW, Firefox seems to have gone the same way as Skype.

They still have a native ALSA backend and there's even a JACK one available.