PulseAudio and Alsa

[Mitchell Smith]

Hi,

I raised this question on the gnome-orca list, however it is pretty Ubuntu 
specific, so I thought I would ask here as well.  For those on both mailing 
lists, please forgive the cross posting.

I would like to use Alsa on my Ubuntu 8.10 installation, firstly because
from reading the Orca wiki I see that speech-dispatcher is slightly more
responsive with Alsa, and secondly I have a couple of third party apps which
require Alsa for sound output.

What I wanted to ask was, can PulseAudio and Alsa co-exist on Ubuntu with
minimal problems, or do I need to completely remove PulseAudio and recompile
any applications and libraries that depend on it to use Alsa instead?

Obviously the best solution would be to leave the system as untouched as 
possible, only having those applications that require low latency access 
Alsa directly, and anything else less timing critical continue to use 
PulseAudio, however I am not sure if both systems will play nicely together.

A quick Google turned up an article on how to disable PulseAudio in a 
non-destructive way, but a read through some of the comments suggest this 
does not come with out some significant side effects.

So has anyone managed to get speech-dispatcher working nicely on Ubuntu 8.10 
with nice fast responsive speech, but keeping most of the PulseAudio 
configuration in place, or does PulseAudio really need to go and I 
reconfigure my system to do things the old way entirely with Alsa?  Or as a 
final thought, would I be better off going with something a little more 
minimalist like Debian or Gentoo where I can make those sorts of decisions 
for myself and build my entire environment from scratch with out any 
PulseAudio at all (obviously not the preferred approach).

Any comments or suggestions in relation to this topic would be very much 
appreciated.

Cheers,

Mitch