Just to comment on why I ended up un-installing portaudio: I booted my Pi with a clean new Raspbian distro, compiled Pd (after installing some packages like git and alsa libs), ran it and found that pulseaudio was running. So I exit Pd and likk pulseaudio via "pulseaudio -kill". Then start Pd and find it _still_ can't open audio. Why? ell, looking back I found that pulseaudio was running again! So I re-killed it and tried a third time. Same result: for some reason, the mere act of starting Pd was causing pulseaudio to start itself up and grab the audio device so that Pd couldn't get it. There are similar plot sequences in old Three Stooges and Marx Brothers movies, but I wasn't exactly laughing. What if I were about to have to walk on stage with this thing? So I googled around and read through the many-page man page for pulseaudio and found no explanation of why this was happening, nor any suggestions for how to disable pulseaudio other than the "-kill" command I had already tried. After a while I lost patience and uninstalled pulse and I suggest that everyone else do so as well.
cheers Miller
Many people who use Pd a lot uninstall pulseaudio entirely.
Ok, let's clear some dust here. There seems a strong notion that pulseaudio is interfering a lot with other audio applications and is causing lots of troubles. Let me point out a few facts from a standard Ubuntu 12.04 installation:
- When no pulseaudio client is playing, the sound device is not occupied
and thus non-compliant applications like Pd are _not_ blocked from accessing the device. This is even the case when you pause a Youtube movie in the browser.
- pasuspender is actually not necessary in most cases. Only when some
pulseaudio client is actually playing, you may want to use pasuspender. However, using pasuspender does not harm, even if it is not necessary
- Use "pasuspender -- pd-extended" instead of "pasuspender pd-extended",
so that options passed to pd-extended are bypassed by pasuspender.
- Uninstalling pulseaudio is completely unnecessary, as it doesn't solve
any problem. OTOH, it also doesn't harm. However, when pulseaudio is installed and Firefox is playing some Youtube movie, you still are able to grant Pd access to the sound device by using pasuspender. With no pulseaudio installed, the flash-plugin might use ALSA directly and there is no other way to stop it from blocking the sound device than to stop firefox. If you don't know which application is currently using the device, good luck with hunting. My point is: With pulseaudio it is actually easier to guarantee Pd access to the sound device.
- Jackd (qjackctl, respectively) behaves similar to Pd: When no pulse
client is playing, you can just start it without any troubles.
Roman
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