Good pointer. I went through /usr/share/alsa-plugins and found a file that defaults modules to pulse and a package offered in ArchLinux called pulseaudeio-alsa provides a single file that goes into /etc/asound.conf with all references to pulse being commented out. I think the original intent was that this file would cause alsa to go back to using itself instead of pulse. But the file I mentioned earlier seems to take precedence so what I think I need to do is uncomment everything in /etc/asound.conf and change the destination modules from pulse to alsa. I will try this over the weekend and see if that clears things up. the giv-away was since I made pulseaudio binary non-executible, I got some interesting pulse related errors whenever I ran the emacspeak espeak server. I think I'm almost out of the woods with this pulse audio mess. I guess the bottom line question though is how we can have pulse audio available for things like gnome but keep espeak tied only to alsa so it won't collide with pulse and kill speech for speakup. On 3/28/13, Jason White <jason at jasonjgw.net> wrote: > Steve Holmes <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote: >>I thought I got pulseaudio disabled like I used to but every time I >>execute the espeak command or run emacspeak, it keeps using pulseaudio >>and killing ALSA until it releases it. Even paplay works but I have >>/etc/pulseaudio/default.pa completely commented out and stupid pulse >>keeps rering its ugly head. Any other ideas on how to stop it in its >>tracks? > > It's probably the default device in your Alsa configuration and you'll have > to > revert that change to use Alsa devices directly instead of going through > PulseAudio. > > I can't give you specific instructions because the configuration details > will > vary somewhat by distribution. > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at linux-speakup.org > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup >