Hi Folks, Taking exclusive soundhardware access is one of the most anoying behaviour of pulseaudio. One other problem is that the pa devs seem not wanting to help in any place if the requested feature don't fit in their thinking style. this is the reason why a11y is broken in most of the linux plain textconsoles and people with disabilities must deal with the broken pulseaudio design and lost the stable accessibility of the textconsole. If you really don't want to change anything in the pa design, simply offer a way that pa can prevented to take exclusive access to the soundhardware by falling back to alsa's dmix. A global setting for dmix fallback will solve a lot of issues in all places. Don't forget that pulseaudio is in use on many home computers where a user itself can be logged in as different users and there are no security concern about the user is sniffing his own mike :-). Just my two cents. Halim A frustrated pa user.
