From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Henningsson Subject: idea: a reserve alsa plugin Date: Thu, 02 May 2013 12:55:05 +0200 Message-ID: <51824609.30405@canonical.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from youngberry.canonical.com (youngberry.canonical.com [91.189.89.112]) by alsa0.perex.cz (Postfix) with ESMTP id E76E62610A5 for ; Thu, 2 May 2013 12:55:05 +0200 (CEST) List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: alsa-devel-bounces@alsa-project.org Sender: alsa-devel-bounces@alsa-project.org To: "alsa-devel@alsa-project.org" , General PulseAudio Discussion List-Id: alsa-devel@alsa-project.org 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? -- David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd. https://launchpad.net/~diwic