[PD] Pd and pulseaudio (was: ALSA output error (restart failed): Broken pipe)

[Kaj Ailomaa]

On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:29:15 +0100, Miller Puckette <msp at ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Just to comment on why I ended up un-installing portaudio: I booted my
> Pi with a clean new Raspbian distro, compiled Pd (after installing some
> packages like git and alsa libs), ran it and found that pulseaudio was
> running.  So I exit Pd and likk pulseaudio via "pulseaudio -kill".  Then  
> start
> Pd and find it _still_ can't open audio.  Why? ell, looking back I found  
> that
> pulseaudio was running again!  So I re-killed it and tried a third time.
> Same result: for some reason, the mere act of starting Pd was causing
> pulseaudio to start itself up and grab the audio device so that Pd  
> couldn't
> get it.  There are similar plot sequences in old Three Stooges and Marx
> Brothers movies, but I wasn't exactly laughing.  What if I were about to
> have to walk on stage with this thing?  So I googled around and read  
> through
> the many-page man page for pulseaudio and found no explanation of why  
> this
> was happening, nor any suggestions for how to disable pulseaudio other  
> than
> the "-kill" command I had already tried.  After a while I lost patience  
> and
> uninstalled pulse and I suggest that everyone else do so as well.
>
> cheers
> Miller
>

Pulseaudio respawns itself, unless you've configured it not to. You can  
disable it temporarily with the tool pasuspender.
The syntax would be:
pasuspender -- pd