System Sounds Using ALSA

[not_the_messiah]

Hi,

I have been unable to get Pulseaudio and ALSA to play nice together, so I have completely removed the former as Skype defaults to using it and nothing else. I also want the ability to play HDMI 5.1 HDMI passthrough through XBMC etc, which again, would not work with pulse.

However, removing pulse means that I no longer get system sounds (the intro music etc), or any sounds coming through the browser - Chromium - (i.e. when using Flash (youtube)). I have searched around the forums a fair bit, but either there is not a solution (but there must be!), or my Google-fu is well below par (more likely!).

Is there any sage out there will to offer some advice?

Cheers

Tim

[Rubberman]

You need to reinstall pulse. As for pulse + alsa, generally there isn't a problem, although the newer versions of ALSA don't deal with multiple simultaneous sound sources well. IE, you cannot be running an audio stream via VLC or other media players (pulse of alsa), and get sound from your browser (ALSA only) at the same time - you need to shut down the media player first. I have reported this to the ALSA bug system about 6 months ago, but nothing has been done to fix it. Older versions of ALSA did not have this problem. You can have multiple pulse sources playing at the same time, however. Example: I stream audio via VLC with pulse, and can play other pulse sources at the same time. However, I can only have one ALSA source play at any time. I cannot play an ALSA source at the same time as a pulse or other ALSA source - only one at a time.