pulseaudio, howto make it work?

[Tim]

On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 09:48 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> But what I'm still left wondering is the fundamental question: "What
> the devil is the problem people imagine exists which they imagine
> pulseaudio solves?". I can't even get my brain wrapped around the
> motivation for pulseaudio. Simply because it is possible?

One feature:  The ability to have several different things playing
sound, each with their own volume levels.  e.g. Your music player
playing at the volume you want, the beeps from your IM program at the
volume you want (including silence) without disrupting the playback of
your music, etc.

Alsa went some way towards letting more than one thing make a sound at
the same time, but you were stuck with one overall volume level.  Which
not-only is it often inappropriate, but it's also a right pain that
adjusting the volume of one thing would affect others.

When I turn my warning beeps up or down, I want them to stay at that
volume.  I don't want adjusting the sound level of my music player to
muck that up.  Pulseaudio goes some way towards that goal, but only if
you play with its own volume control, instead of your sound card mixer.
Really, the volumes should be set on the applications, for themselves,
and themselves alone.  e.g. The volume control on XMMS ought to *only*
affect XMMS.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.