Getting rid of PulseAudio

Found an excellent guide (in Swedish) to remove PulseAudio. Basically do this:

alsamixer
Check that your system uses Pulseaudio (it says clearly by Card and Chip) in the top left corner.

sudo rm /etc/X11/Xsession.d/70pulseaudio
killall pulseaudio
sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
sudo apt-get install esound

Then run:
alsamixer
And check that it is not using PulseAudio any longer.

I will report after thorough testing if it works fine.

XBMC yes, as long as you get rid of PulseAudio

As I wrote in my earlier post about PulseAudio it doesn’t work to well with XBMC Media Center.

I have now been using XBMC quite a lot for a full week and have no problems what so ever, as long as PulseAudio is closed first.

sudo killall pulseaudio

As soon as I have a little more time I will investigate how a uninstall of PulseAudio could affect the system…

XBMC and Pulseaudio

Xbox Media Center seems to have a share of problems on my system. The most recent events has been that the audio seems to crash, either going silent or getting stuck in a endless loop that’s quite annoying. This seems to happen quite often if I jump in movies.

The first solution, rebooting the system, wasn’t exactly neat. The second is sort-of work-in-progress. But it seems to work which is nice:

In System – Preferences – Sound I’ve changed all settings to use ALSA

Then either before I start XBMC or when the problem occurs I run:

sudo killall pulseaudio
ps aux | grep pulse

If there still is pulseaudio processes left I kill them with

sudo kill -9 whateverprocess

I think this happens mostly when I has been running XBMC and the audio is hung. Of course the ideal thing here would be to disable pulseaudio completely, or to pray for team-xbmc to fix this. I have not decided what to do yet, I have to do some reading on this PulseAudio, it might be there for some other reason than to break XBMC.