Pulseaudio Nightmares - Pure ALSA to the Rescue

In the latest stable Ubuntu (9.04), pulseaudio still does not work reliably on my hardware (intel HDA with digital SPDIF out). I upgraded to 9.10 and had even more problems. Sound always worked on boot, but often broke down after a while. And I could not find easy ways to make it work other than rebooting... Killing/restarting pulseaudio, looking at the processes using snd did not work.

One thing works wonderfully, pure ALSA. To have multilple apps sharing ALSA, I just use dmix. As I use digital out, there is no mixer, but ALSA can provide one through softvol. It works really well. ALSA is already not that simple to configure/setup properly, but with pulseaudio on top, welcome to your worst configuration nightmares.

Here is the .asoundrc I use:

 
pcm.amix {
   type dmix
   ipc_key 50557
   slave {
       pcm "hw:0,1"
       period_time 0
       period_size 1024
       buffer_size 8192
   }
   bindings {
       0 0
       1 1
   }
}

pcm.softvol {
    type            softvol
    slave {
        pcm         "amix"      #redirect the output to dmix (instead of "hw:0,0")
    }
    control {
        name        "PCM"       #override the PCM slider to set the softvol volume level globally
        card        0
    }
}


pcm.!default {
    type            plug
    slave.pcm       "softvol"   #make use of softvol
}