From: Paul Davis <paul(a)linuxaudiosystems.com>
 Subject: Re: [LAU] RME HDSP Multiface and PulseAudio
 To: "Steve Fosdick" <sjflists(a)btinternet.com>
 Cc: linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
 Date: Friday, June 25, 2010, 12:52 PM
 On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:55 AM,
 Steve Fosdick <sjflists(a)btinternet.com>
 wrote:
  I have, for the moment, my RME HDSP Multiface at
home 
 along with a nice
  pair of Sennheiser headphones.  The headphones
show 
 up the shortcomings
  of the integrated audio I/F on the motherboard so
I'd 
 like to be able to
  route "normal" audio to the RME, e.g.
use it for 
 things like listening
  to music with rhtythmbox, which seems to mean
 persuading PulseAudio to
  output to it. 
 no, it doesn't. gstreamer has a jack plugin, and you can
 just have RB
 send directly to JACK with it. just set either your
 gstreamer
 properties or system sound properties to use jackaudiosink
 the
 gstreamer plugin has its own issues, the most annoying of
 which being
 that it disconnects and reconnects for every song, but i
 use it to
 listen to my music collection and i-radio all day while
 doing ardour
 development.
 as fons note, pulseaudio really doesn't have a clue what to
 do with a
 card like the HDSP. it could be coerced into doing
 something
 reasonable, but its hardly worth it. 
I have a system with an RME HDSP card (Multiface II system) and I faced the exact same
issue. So I hacked an ALSA 2 Jack bridge:
Works really good for what I am using it for. No pulseaudio, no gstreamer, pure ALSA only.
Good luck :)
J.