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cyker

Member

Registered: 2009-05-30

Posts: 86

ALSA: Trying to reset sound card

I have ALSA and Pulseaudio installed on my machine. When I play with

mplayer -ao pulse

It generally works fine even when the audio device gets stuck (just a bit glitch). However, if I play with

mplayer -ao alsa

When the audio device gets stuck, it gives me

[AO_ALSA] Write error: Broken pipe
[AO_ALSA] Trying to reset soundcard.

It's thrilling when the soundcard is reset and there is a sudden increase in the volume.  And I'm curious why the soundcard got reset.

I'm also wondering what happens when I specify ALSA as the audio output driver with Pulseaudio installed. Does Pulseaudio act as a proxy between ALSA and the actual soundcard hardware, or is it simply ignored?

Last edited by cyker (2015-05-18 02:57:49)

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V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,076

Re: ALSA: Trying to reset sound card

Hmm what do you mean the audio device gets stuck? does it stop playing or start to stutter or what?

Maybe it has problems when being reinitialized, set

exit-idle-time=-1

in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf which should prevent it from being unloaded

Regarding your question, it will act as a proxy when you install pulseaudio-alsa and (lib32-)alsa-plugins (and your ALSA application uses the default device defined by the /etc/asound.conf, created by pulseaudio-alsa) otherwise it will be ignored, thus blocking the device from being used by other clients (or if pulse-applications are active, blocking ALSA only clients from connecting).