On 05/02/2013 02:37 PM, Arun Raghavan wrote: > On Thu, 2013-05-02 at 12:55 +0200, David Henningsson wrote: >> Just had an idea which I'll write down here before I forget it >> again...and I'm not saying I'll implement this anytime soon either, but >> here goes: >> >> There is a device reserve protocol between PulseAudio and JACK2 - when >> JACK needs the sound card, it'll send a dbus message to PulseAudio and >> grab a name in D-Bus. >> >> However, there are plenty of applications who like to access ALSA >> directly, without going through JACK2 or PulseAudio. By making a >> "reserve" plugin, we could have this functionality for those apps too. >> >> In practice, if the app usually opens "plughw:0" or "hw:0", it could >> instead open "reserve:plughw:0" or "reserve:hw:0" to also reserve the >> device from PulseAudio usage while the device is open. Meanwhile, >> PulseAudio is free to use other audio devices (which is not the case >> when using e g pasuspender). >> >> How does that sound? > > Might be neat to do have desktops set up to do this whenever an ALSA > device is opened (that is do it unconditionally when hw:X or plughw:X is > opened). Including when PA opens it? :P I would prefer to do it explicitly, due to the possible overhead of talking to D-Bus. One could possibly imagine it being done automatically with plughw, but definitely not with hw only because that's meant to be as low as you can possibly get. -- David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd. https://launchpad.net/~diwic
