[arch-general] Basic questions about Linux's sound system

[Joakim Hernberg]

On Tue, 31 Jan 2017 11:38:19 -0500 (EST)
Jude DaShiell <jdashiel at panix.com> wrote:

> It helps when screen reading or speech synthesis is real time or as
> near to real time as possible.  Thanks for putting this information
> out since I could use one set of speakers for speech and another set
> I have connected for other audio when I can figure out how to get it
> correctly configured until you replied, I didn't even know this was
> possible.

My 2 cents ;)

I'll skip the anti PA stuff, but note that it's possibly not the best
to use in conjunction with JACK, as it's not intended for low latency
audio, and the pulse to jack bridge seems to occasionally cause xruns
on my systems.

That said it seems to work more or less well. Personally I kept it off
my systems for many years, but have lately started caving in ;)  On my
desktop I run it on a separate card to the one that I use for jack, and
I have a mixer which i use to control output level from the 2 cards.
PA is used for all the desktop audio, and jack for my reaper (daw) work
in wine.

On the laptop I mostly use 2 cards too, so same scenario, but I also
have it setup so that I can bring up a bridge so the desktop audio
(PA) will go to jack instead of the builtin card.  I can also run jack
on the builtin and let PA connect to it.

I even know of a few people that run PA on the alsa loopback device,
and then use alsa_in/out or zita-a2jbridge to connect the loopback to
jack :)

-- 

   Joakim