Hello, I'm working on speech-dispatcher, that is an accessibility application, basically an interface to speech synthesis. Its services are used by programs running inside gnome-session as well by those who are not (for example a text console screen reader, a reader for GDM or something that talks when it is impossible to start X etc.) I'd like to consult one thing with you that we face when trying to migrate to PulseAudio. We have a special Pulse Audio daemon running under the user speech-dispatcher for our system-wide Speech Dispatcher (which is independent of Gnome Session or X) and then each user launches his own Pulse Audio and Speech Dispatcher inside his gnome session. Each Speech Dispatcher opens a connection to Pulse Audio at startup and doesn't close it until it is terminated (it sends multiple requests to play something or it may not send anything for quite a while, but it doesn't want to close the connection for performance and other reasons). Now obviously, if both Dispatchers keep the connection, there is a conflict over which of the two PulseAudio daemons can access alsa:hw:0,0. It never happens that both of the Pulse Audios would be asked to play a sound at once, so in theory, everything is fine. In practice however, it seems that PulseAudio keeps alsa:hw:0,0 open as long as the Speech Dispatcher is connected to it, regardles of whether it is currently playing something or not. I've tried to suspend the sink when there is nothing to play in Speech Dispatcher. This does the expected thing and I'm now able to switch between these two Dispatchers/Pulse Audio daemons as long as I don't ask them to play both at the same time (which is not a problem, as I said). The unwanted effect of the suspension of the sinks however is that it affects all other clients connected to the same Pulse Audio, which is a big problem for the one inside gnome-session. What I want to do, is to say to Pulse Audio: ''My application is not going to play anything now, you are free to close hw:0,0 if you wish''. And if all the applications connected to Pulse Audio say this, then Pulse Audio would free the access to the soundcard. Currently, what the suspend seems to do however, is to tel Pulse Audio: ''I don't want you to play anything now,'' which is something I can't really do because I have no information about the other clients, whether they need the soundcard or no. So is there some possibility to say: ''Please suspend the sink if nobody else needs it now''? Or perhaps I'm on a wrong path and there is a better way how to make two Speech Dispatchers running under different users switch smoothly without having to close the connection to Pulse or affecting other sound applications? Thank you for your help, Hynek Hanke
