While most of my posts here simply get ignored (maybe most of them ARE stupid questions, but I wouldn't mind if somebody pointed out WHY exactly are they stupid), I'll still try to add my 2c to this discussion. On Gentoo, ever since alsa-plugins 1.0.12, pulse plugin is compiled with -DNDEBUG. The comment in the ebuild is: # For some reasons the polyp/pulse plugin does fail with alsaplayer with # a failed assert. As the code works just fine with asserts disabled, # for now disable them waiting for a better solution. I don't know, if the original problem is still valid, but when I recently tried to build it without it, while most of the apps worked, all of openal-based didn't. But when I simply removed assert(pcm->last_size >= (size * pcm->frame_size)); in pcm_pulse.c, those apps worked again and the sound seems fine. The most annoying thing was that asserts brought down whole apps not just sound.
