pasuspender should switch the default alsa device from pulse to dmix (or whatever is was originally)

[belegdol]

Hi,

currently installing alsa-plugins-pulseaudio (on Fedora, at least) changes the default alsa device to pulse. This renders pasuspender partially useless for alsa applications, since they will still need try use pulseaudio. In order to test native alsa now it is necessary to either edit .asoundrc, or to temporarily remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio. It would be nice if that was not the case.

[coling]

I don't think pasuspender should do this personally. Fiddling about with your config files is always going to end up severely pissing some users off. And restoring them again could also lead to some kind of invalid state in the event of a crash or power failure etc.

A better solution would be to make the pulse alsa plugin fall back to dmix if pulseaudio was unable to handle the request (e.g. due to it being suspended). I think sjoerd had some code to potentially do just that, but I'm not sure how stable it ultimately turned out to be.

Even then, the ultimate proper solution is to fix whatever app required you to use pasuspender in the first place, so it can go through pulse like everything else!

[belegdol]

Fixing the application is the long term goal, of course. I only wanted to point out that pasuspender is not as useful for working around broken ones as it could be.

[lennart]

Hmm. I am not convinced that pasuspender should fiddle with config files, especially not foreign ones. I think this is better implemented in an external script that calls pasuspender in its middle.

[belegdol]

how about the solution suggested by coling then?

[lennart]

Replying to belegdol:

how about the solution suggested by coling then?

That code is readily available in alsa-plugins. But it contradicts autospawning a bit and slows things down when using remote systems, so I generally advise against using it.