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

Miller Puckette msp at ucsd.edu
Fri Feb 1 18:29:15 CET 2013


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

> > Many people who use Pd a lot uninstall pulseaudio entirely.
> 
> Ok, let's clear some dust here. There seems a strong notion that
> pulseaudio is interfering a lot with other audio applications and is
> causing lots of troubles. Let me point out a few facts from a standard
> Ubuntu 12.04 installation:
> 
> * When no pulseaudio client is playing, the sound device is not occupied
> and thus non-compliant applications like Pd are _not_ blocked from
> accessing the device. This is even the case when you pause a Youtube
> movie in the browser. 
> 
> * pasuspender is actually not necessary in most cases. Only when some
> pulseaudio client is actually playing, you may want to use pasuspender.
> However, using pasuspender does not harm, even if it is not necessary
> 
> * Use "pasuspender -- pd-extended" instead of "pasuspender pd-extended",
> so that options passed to pd-extended are bypassed by pasuspender.
> 
> * Uninstalling pulseaudio is completely unnecessary, as it doesn't solve
> any problem. OTOH, it also doesn't harm. However, when pulseaudio is
> installed and Firefox is playing some Youtube movie, you still are able
> to grant Pd access to the sound device by using pasuspender. With no
> pulseaudio installed, the flash-plugin might use ALSA directly and there
> is no other way to stop it from blocking the sound device than to stop
> firefox. If you don't know which application is currently using the
> device, good luck with hunting. 
> My point is: With pulseaudio it is actually easier to guarantee Pd
> access to the sound device.
> 
> * Jackd (qjackctl, respectively) behaves similar to Pd: When no pulse
> client is playing, you can just start it without any troubles.
> 
>   
> Roman
> 
> 
> 
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