Hardy Heron -- Pulseaudio interferes with non-gnome audio

[Tomas Carnecky]

Susan Cragin wrote:
> The new default pulseaudio in Hardy screws up every program that isn't gnome, delivering terrible sound. 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/198453

Applications that use ALSA should work fine with the alsa pulse plugin - 
  should. Unfortunately the plugin has a few bugs, and the developers 
(of both pulseaudio and alsa) have been unresponsive in this matter. See
  - http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/198
  - https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601

> Question -- what does WINE do with pulseaudio?

Some suggested to create a native PulseAudio wine driver. That would 
yield the best results as far as the performance and reliability goes. 
Unfortunately we'll be stuck with the alsa driver for some time to come, 
so I tried to do the best to make the alsa pulse plugin to work with 
wine. I had to patch both the wine alsa driver as well as the alsa pulse 
plugin and it worked fine for my taste.

I submitted the patch to wine-patches:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-February/050561.html

I don't know if the relevant alsa pulse plugin patch is publicly 
available, I haven't looked at that matter in a long time. Some of the 
needed patches are probably still in my local repositories. It makes no 
sense for me to work on this anymore until the developers respond to my 
questions.

> http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=112021

I heard that the skype developers are very interested in getting skype 
working with pulseaudio, even helped tisting some patches. I have gotten 
skype to work with pulseaudio, I think if you apply the second patch 
attached to alsa bug #2601 skype will work. I haven't looked at the code 
since because apparently nobody from the alsa team is interested in 
fixing the bug.

tom