how to disable pulseaudio

[Sonal Santan]

Hello,

You can try the following two steps to /sideline/ pulse audio on 8.10

[1]
Open /etc/pulse/default.pa in an editor. Look for lines similar to the 
following two commented out lines:

#load-module module-alsa-sink
#load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:1,0

Add the following two lines after these two lines:

load-module module-alsa-sink device=dmix
load-module module-alsa-source device=dsnoop

The above change will force PA to use dmix/dsnoop and not take exclusive 
control of sound hardware.

[2]
Open /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf in an editor. Comment out the line which 
says /usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf by inserting a # in the beginning. After 
the change, the @hooks section would look something like the following.

@hooks [
    {
        func load
        files [
#           "/usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf"
            "/usr/share/alsa/bluetooth.conf"
            "/etc/asound.conf"
            "~/.asoundrc"
        ]
        errors false
    }
]

This will prevent PA from presenting itself as default output/input for 
all sound applications. Hence the other applications can continue to use 
ALSA as if there is no PA.

The above two changes fix all PA nuisance and all my sound applications 
work fine. You will need to select ALSA as sound device in 
System->Preferences->Sound. With these changes PA is rendered useless 
but it continues to run though nobody would use it. It doesn't consume 
any system resources. I still do not know what needs to be changed so 
that PA is not even started.

Sonal

H.S. wrote:
> H.S. wrote:
>
>   
>> Well, I hate to say this, but there are still some kinks in multimedia
>> playback with pulseaudio on Hardy. The user reported this to be only
>> recently. Apparently, Totem player does not play some avi files (grabbed
>> by a digicam) properly. I tested and gxine does. Also, some news
>> websites' video clips are not being played properly.
>>
>> So, where does that leave us? Looks like pulse audio is a mess at
>> present with at least the current scenario regarding flash and possibly
>> with some avi files (though it may be a question of the right codec).
>>
>> So I have decided to roll back the computer in question to using alsa
>> and forgo pulse audio for now.
>>
>> BTW, pulse audio is working fine in all these respects on my computer,
>> Debian Testing. So I am confident the newer releases of Ubuntu will have
>> improvements regarding this.
>>
>> Regards.
>>
>>     
>
> Just wanted to know if somebody knows how to disable pulseaudio in Hardy.
>
> I have so far set all options in Preferences->Sound to use Alsa. I have
> uninstalled some packages regarding pulse audio and also remove
> /etc/asound.conf that I used to set pulseaudio to default. I now have
> only the following packages remaining regarding pulseaudio:
> gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio libpulse-browse0 libpulse-mainloop-glib0
> libpulse0 libpulsecore5 pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-utils
>
> But I still see a pulse audio process when a user is logged in:
>  $ ps uax | grep pulse
> hs       6192  0.0  1.0  26976  4876 ?        S<l  21:17   0:04
> /usr/bin/pulseaudio --log-target=syslog
>
>
> So, what do I need to really disable pulseaudio. Preferably the option
> should not involve uninstalling pulseaudio package (moreover, if I try
> to remove pulseaudio in Hardy, it also wants to remove other desktop
> packages).
>
> Thanks.
>