[PD] Sometimes I cannot select ALSA on Linux

[Matteo Sisti Sette]

Hi,

With Pd Vanilla 0.42.5 under Ubuntu, at random times, the following happens:

- I open the "media" menu and select ALSA
- I review (but don't change) the audio settings and click Apply and OK
- This doesn't work: ALSA get not selected (if I open the media menu 
again it is not checked), and there is no sound.

No matter how many times I repeat the procedure (without restarting pd) 
there's no way to get it to work. But if I close and reopen Pd, then 
most of the times it works.

No error message appears in the console, but if I've run pd from the 
command line I can see this error in the terminal (by the way isn't it 
wrong that such a critical error isn't reflected in the console?):

""
snd_pcm_open (input): Device or resource busy
snd_pcm_open (output): Device or resource busy
""

How comes that the resource is busy if I have no other application using 
it? And why is it busy sometimes and sometimes it isn't (without closing 
and opening any application, other than Pd, between retries)? And if 
restarting and retrying works, why doesn't just retrying work? (i.e. 
selecting ALSA again without restarting Pd)?



Is there a way to have Pd use Pulse Audio? I know I can use Jack but I 
have to start the jack server etc; when I don't care too much about 
latency and the like, I would like to just have Pd's sound pass through 
Pulse Audio as everything else. Is that possible? How?

thanks
m.