Hector Martin

(Problems with mixing simultaneous audio streams was a real issue with ALSA years ago)

Apparently it's still an issue https://twitter.com/zeefreak/status/964162903392817156 …

I've never had an issue with this when running pulse over alsa, but I haven't looked into the internals of the interface, maybe pulse mixes the audio before sending to alsa? That's kinda neat though, curious why this has persisted as long as it has.

Pulse mixes everything. ALSA has dmix which can do the same but isn't enabled by default these days (because PA takes care of it). And PA usually has an ALSA plugin so *everything* should go to PA and get mixed by default.

If you have a really boneheaded legacy app that hardcodes the audio output device on ALSA or insists on direct hardware access then yeah, that will not work properly and will block other audio if there was nothing playing before.

Word. I even produce music on Linux. Sound problems are like 10 years gone now. But when people are told to remove Pulseaudio because old linuxers had have problems with it, you won't get the advantage of it. You can even add a jack-sink & play multiple PA sources & jack at once.

Yeah, when streaming from Linux I do pulse bridged to jack, and jack handles all the interfacing to alsa. I actually find it far better than than achieving similar routing in windows, tbh. Complex software audio routing in windows is painful.

Yeah, I regularly mix PA and JACK in interesting ways. I have two audio interfaces, external FireWire and internal HDA, and 4 different routing hubs: physical mixer, PulseAudio, JACK connections, and the FW card's internal crossbar mixer, all interconnected.