A good point, but you can't expect all Linux applications to alter their sound playback to be forward compatible with Pulse. I'm sure Skype will get right on that. :) There is still the case where programs that _do_ play long sound streams will still not be accessible when they don't play sounds. (Ex, a Banshee/Amarok that's stopped). I suppose it comes down to what you see Pulseaudio as an abstraction around: streams of sound, or the sources of sound themselves. I always like to think of it as the sources(applications) themselves, since that is immediately recognizable. A user sees Banshee on the screen and knows that Banshee plays sound; he's not concerned with whether it's playing a sound at that very second or not. Even if the app is quiet, the app is still there; it's unintuitive that Pulseaudio has suddenly forgotten about it just because it's not playing. I understand that's an opinion though. (It's also possible that you've addressed the actual problem in practice when I get around to using the new version. Being an end-user I'd rather see it be easy to use regardless of the implementation details).
