One major problem I've had with disabling Pulseaudio on any system whose sound card only handles a single audio stream is latency with regard to the ALSA Dmix plugin. I do now have a system that probably runs best with such a setup, but I have found the latency associated with Dmix to be quite problematic, and haven't yet found a way to adjust it so that I can mix multiple audio streams without causing delays when interrupting speech or enduring a seemingly unresponsive system overall. ALso, I generally run GNOME with a fallback to the command line, usually in cases where I intentionally break something in the graphical environment and need to fix it, which is quite a bit more likely on the old laptop I would be using to test a setup without Pulseaudio than on my desktop, which I use for everyday tasks that require a working system, and does not give me the freedom to break things. I do, however, need access to both Orca/speech-dispatcher and Speakup/Espeakup on this system, so it would certainly help to be able to use Dmix or another method of handling multiple streams at once using Alsa witout Pulseaudio, if it wasn't for the latency issues I have. If anyone has multiple streams playing through a sound card that normally only plays a single stream and at the same time has figured out how to solve the latency problems with ALSA/Dmix, and if anyone has figured out how to keep Espeak from chopping words/letters in speech-dispatcher using ALSA directly, please let me know how to make this setup work correctly. You may certainly contact me off-list to help me personally with such a setup, but I'm thinking that many on this list may also be able to benefit as well. Thanks for any help. ~Kyle http://kyle.tk/ -- "Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?" Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"
