Hi, while I also have been annoyed sometimes by the blocking behavior of Pulseaudio, I tried to hack it yesterday a bit, to cope with ALSA dmix. Basically, PA itself can run well with dmix PCM when explicitly specified at loading module-alsa-{sink,source} modules. But, this requires the change of the system-wide config file, and also it doesn't work with HAL detection. What I've done is to add a new option, pcm_default, to module-hal-detect and module-alsa-card modules. When this option is set to 1, "default" PCM (normally dmix) is taken instead of "hw" and other exclusive accesses that PA usually prefers. This is an easy part. Now, the question is how gracefully integrating this into the system. You may have both GNOME and KDE (or whatever else) on a single system. Thus it's not wise to change the system default only for dmix or not. Also, it's not sexy to copy the whole /etc/default.pa at each time (think of updating packages). And, PA has no config files to specify module options. As a workaround, I extended the PA config parser to allow the nested if/else/endif, and accept the path like ~/foo. With these extensions, /etc/default.pa can have a block like the following: .ifexists ~/.pulse-detect .include ~/.pulse-detect .else .... normal detection ... .endif Now, just put the following line into your ~/.pulse-detect, PA works with dmix without breaking any others: load module-hal-detect pcm_default=1 If ~/.pulse-detect doesn't exist, the system-wide detection will be used (i.e. for GNOME). Test packages can be found in OBS home:tiwai:branches:multimedia:libs/pulseaudio repo. (FACTORY packages don't seem to be built yet, though.) The new patches are found as pulse-*.diff. This is a pure hack done in a couple of hours, and there is no guarantee that the upstream will be satisfied with it. So, I'm not sure whether we should take this to FACTORY now or not. But, at least, it'd be better for them to keep PA than dropping completely... Any comments / suggestions / test reports appreciated. thanks, Takashi -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org