PulseAudio OR PortAudio/Alsa

[Marcelo]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:17 PM, Brandon Kruse <bkruse at openmoko.org> wrote:

> ~    a) there was always a device binded to /dev/snd/* (pulseaudio), and
> this is not usually the case on linux systems. (Though I heard
> you could force the alsa library to use the device anyways....)

You have to configure alsa to use the pulseaudio plugin.  Something like this:

/etc/asound.conf:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

and that should do it.  Then you make pulseaudio use the alsa device
to actually output sound.

This is a good thing because in this way no application can grab the
sound devices for itself.  They all go thru alsa which goes thru PA
which goes back to alsa.  It's not as horrible performance-wise as it
might initially appear.

Marcelo