Comment # 39 on bug 965328 from Takashi Iwai

(In reply to Jogchum Reitsma from comment #38)
> Solved.
> 
> Problem appeared to be timidity blocking one of the (32) subdevices of the
> Soundblaster. That was enough for pulseaudio to mark the whole card as busy;
> PA doesn't support hardware mixing.

Ah, that's the secret I didn't know...  Should have started from the basic.

> I disabled timidity, and now sound can be routed through the soundblaster.

SB has the wavetable support, so it's no big merit of using timidity?

Also, you can start timidity with the second substream (hw:0,0,1), so that it
won't conflict with PA.  The device name can be specified via --output option
or TIMIDITY_PCM_DEVICE env variable.