Bug#600336: rhythmbox: Claims audio device all for itself

[Manuel Bilderbeek]

Hi,

On 10/16/2010 05:01 PM, Nathan A. Stine wrote:
> Pulseaudio is designed to claim the audio device for itself.

Yeah, like ESD.

> I believe you have 3 choices here:
>
> 1) Don't use pulseaudio
> 2) Configure gstreamer (and by extension, rhythmbox) to use pulseaudio
> 3) Use pasuspender to suspend pulseaudio while you use rhythmbox
>
> You can use gstreamer-properties if you choose #2.

Thanks for the advice. I do wonder how I got pulseaudio, as I never 
installed it explicitly and the result was that I got the mentioned 
problems, of which it wasn't really clear why they ocurred. What would 
happen if a 'newbie' would encounter this issue?

A few months ago a friend of mine tried Ubuntu (yes, I know Ubuntu != 
Debian), and all of his SDL-based apps hung up when starting up. Cause 
was pulseaudio... To me it seems that pulseaudio should never be 
installed automatically, because there are many apps that simply won't 
work with it, apparently. Without my help, he would have directly given 
up on Linux.

In other words, #2 isn't going to solve this for other apps and I'm a 
bit worried how PA can ruin user experience for common users.

(Obviously, I went for #1)

-- 
Kind regards,

Manuel