On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 7:08 AM, deloptes <deloptes@...> wrote:
> Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>
>> what happens with alsamixer and alsamixergui?   i suspect you have a
>> loop on your hands where pulseaudio has taken control without your
>> consent or knowledge of the ALSA devices.
>>
>
> what do you mean? I installed pulse and let it take control. alsamixer works
> just fine. When alsamixer is invoked without argument, it shows pulseaudio
> as audiocard.

 ... so pulseaudio is configured to "take over" ALSA, and to offer an
alternative ALSA interface.

> When I run it with -c 0 it shows the audiocard as when pulse
> was not installed

 ok yes, so that tells us that pulseaudio is trying to "take over"
ALSA, then offer a 2nd ALSA "gateway" interface.


> when killing PA, kmix also goes at 100% CPU - need to quit kmix. When I
> press volume key kmix starts again

 interesting.


> Well, I appreciate your opinion,

 ... experience.  pulseaudio is involved in most of the audio f***-ups
i've been forced to deal with.


> but there must be a solution, so that kmix
> does not go 100% CPU.

 it's the first time i've ever heard of kmix doing that... but then i
never ran it with pulseaudio.

 what happens if you run it *without* pulseaudio?  is it fine then?

 also, have you ever installed jackd (and the jackd pulseaudio
plugin).  i now run with jackd->pulseaudio because i have a MIDI
application that i occasionally run... but also it turns out that
applications are a bit more stable going through jackd.

 the advantage is that f****g pulseaudio gets the f*** off the damn
ALSA interface (because it detects that jackd is running and managing
it), and jackd does a hell of a lot better job of directing audio
through to ALSA.

l.