[LAU] Diagnosing JACK

[Len Ovens]

On Fri, 9 Oct 2015, Kaza Kore wrote:

> Last time I looked into removing PulseAudio from a Ubuntu Studio was a 12.04
> installation (and I'm not currently running 14.04 but highly doubt that much has
> changed) it wanted to remove the entire DE and about 20 other bits of software on
> apt-get uninstall! I have never seen Ubuntu just say it will remove PA and
> nothing else from that command in my personal experience. Hence why I went the
> route of removing the executable flag from the file it opens instead, when I

There is a "PA must be removed" religion... best to ignore it. A lot of it 
has more to do with the people invloved with making PA and their 
attitudes rather than if PA works well or not. Some of it is also from 
when PA had a lot more problems than it does now.

Personally, I find that things are easiest with PA left in place. I 
comment out the lines in /etc/pulse/default.pa
-----------8<-------------
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect
.else
------------8<-------------

So that pulse never sees any ALSA devices, or touches them.

I use:
pactl load-module module-jackdbus-detect channels=2 > /dev/null

When I need desktop audio, and:
pactl unload-module module-jackdbus-detect 2> /dev/null

When I want to make sure PA is out of the way. PA still runs but desktop 
audio is sent to a dummy output and uses no noticable CPU cycles. In any 
case it has no effect Jack and it's clients.

Certainly it is possible to run with no pulse and still have good desktop 
audio (maybe even with skype), but that is for people who download source 
and build everything, or those who are willing to make their own distro. 
It is much easier to just use pulse for desktop stuff. If you are using a 
*buntu, the kxstudio archives has cadence that can do most of this stuff 
for you.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net