Excerpts from Jan Steffens's message of 2010-04-19 12:45:30 +0200:
On Mon, 2010-04-19 at 12:23 +0200, Philipp wrote:
I heard from other distros that PA is hard to kill there, and hence it's hard to free the interface for jack, but I don't know whether that's true for Arch.
From what I know the problem here is that the client library will start the local server if it's accessed but not running.
So e.g. while the GNOME volume control is running or every time an application tries to output an alert sound, the PulseAudio server is restarted.
Fortunately this is less of a problem with recent PulseAudio versions, as the server will release the ALSA device if it becomes idle.
I don't think that's the thing I remember. I think it was some PA setting in ubuntu that made it persistent, so if it was killed for whatever reason it was restarted immediately. Point is, as long as something like that doesn't happen it should be fine. You can shut down PA using whatever means and start jack. If PA tries to start then the device will simply not be available. And in case you configured PA to load the two necessary modules for jack support it will just start and output to jack. The only possible issue I see then is that PA apparently autoconnects to the first two outs, which might be dangerous. But when the user has to configure PA to do this he should be aware of this possible issue as well. Anyway, good luck with your application. Regards, Philipp