Bug 43945

Summary:	Let pulseaudio share audio devices
Product:	PulseAudio	Reporter:	Sever Oraz <severoraz>
Component:	core	Assignee:	pulseaudio-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	pulseaudio-bugs
Severity:	major
Priority:	medium	CC:	colin, lennart
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86-64 (AMD64)
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Sever Oraz 2011-12-19 00:28:56 UTC

Pulseaudio monopolizes the sound devices in the computer. Some applications, however, don't work well with pulseaudio. There should be a way to configure pulseaudio in which access to sound hardware is not only possible through pulseaudio.

Origin of this bug report
-------------------------
Wine used to support many sound servers, but now it only brings built-in support for Alsa. PulseAudio has an Alsa plugin, which lets Wine reproduce sounds. The problem is, this plugin is not perfect, and when the CPU peaks for some reason, sometimes sound is taken away from wine. This has something to do with "underruns" but I don't understand that concept yet, so I can't give more details about it. In order to restore sound to the wine application after this occurs, either wine or pulseaudio need to be restarted.

Comment 1 Colin Guthrie 2012-03-13 18:54:28 UTC

PulseAudio already offers ways for applications to request exclusive control of the hardware via a DBus reservation protocol. jackd already uses this mechanism to wrestle control away from us.

By the very nature of how PA works, it's impossible to set it up in any vaguely sensible way to "share" the h/w.

So closing this bug as wontfix.

Obviously the underlying problems that resulted in this request should be investigated and fixed (the classic case of posting a "problem" in the form of a "solution" as a bug report - "problems" are generally better posted as "problems" :)).

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