Can pulseaudio be made to work with consoles and Orca at the same time?

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 1/1/2010 7:07 AM, Bill Cox wrote:

> Any basically usable Linux system for the blind needs Orca and speakup
> working together.  Pulseaudio, SFAIK, only allows one instance to use
> the sound card at a time.  Pulseaudio also requires each user to have
> his own copy.  Speakup runs before any user logs in, and therefore
> must run as it's own user.
>
> Therefore... pulseaudio can't work on any truely accessible Linux box?
>   Is this basically true?  If this can be fixed, which peice of code
> needs fixing (I'm willing to fix it)?  Should we try and make multiple
> instances of pulseaudio play nice together so they can share the sound
> card?

I will admit I haven't played with this lately that was a problem as of a few 
months ago. Specifically using multiple sound devices with speech recognition 
(or any other app requiring audio input such as a telephone.

For some reason, Lennox audio systems don't seem to cope very well with a USB 
microphone  because instead of letting it stand as a second device, it seems to 
displace the primary audio device in favor of a USB device and not leave the 
application which one it wants to use. My favorite use case is using a headset 
to speak with someone (voip) while running rhythm box playing some tunes in the 
background. For voip, you can also substitute wine running NaturallySpeaking.

in any case, I think is a generic problem dealing with multiple devices and if 
you can fix it, that would be fantastic.