[arch-general] problem with pulseaudio when resuming from pm-suspend

[Tom Gundersen]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My guess is that what happens is that pulseaudio blocks the sound
>> device, and that's the reason you don't hear the beep when it is
>> running (i.e. when sounds play). Disabling PA as Ralf suggests would
>> in this case not help at all, and likely just make it worse (I wish
>> people would stop suggesting to disable PA regardless of what the
>> problem is, in most cases this is not going to make things easier).
>
> I'm confused. Why is pulseaudio so necessary?

No one is claiming that PA is necessary. Just that removing it without
further thought is not going to necessarily make things any easier.

> I just use alsa for sound
> and have no problems whatsoever.

I'd guess that most users of both PA and ALSA have no problems at all.
There are a few cases when swapping from one to the other might be a
good idea:

Move from PA to ALSA: If your hardware/drivers do not work well with
PA. There are some examples of this, but for the vast majority of
hardware this is not a problem.

Move from ALSA to PA: If you have problems getting your mixer levels
or other settings right. If you are have issues with too high power
consumption. If you need audio to work with fast-user-switching. If
you want per-app volume controls. If you want bluetooth audio to work
out of the box. If you want low-latency, but don't want to use Jack.
Etc...

In the beginning PA caused a lot of grief for a lot of people, and
some distros (not Arch!) moved to it too soon. These days there should
be no need to especially caution against PA, it has its bugs and
issues as all software does, but nothing out of the ordinary.

-t