Pulseaudio(?) vs. Flash vs. Amarok

[Matthew Flaschen]

Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 00:29 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
>> If you start Firefox to play a Flash URL, Amarok is silent, till you
>> kill Firefox and Amarok, and restart Amarok.  Similarly, if you start
>> Amarok, Firefox/Flash will be silent till Amarok is killed and Firefox
>> is restarted.  I thought Pulseaudio was supposed to provide multiplex
>> capabilities for Linux -- apparently not.
> 
> It is supposed to, but will still be held up by other things which do
> not use PulseAudio.  Any one of them grabbing hold of the audio
> hardware, and not letting go, will prevent anything else from using it,
> including PulseAudio.

Yes, but isn't PulseAudio also supposed to provide fake device files so
programs that do this can't actually get exclusive control and instead
use PulseAudio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PulseAudio)?

Matt Flaschen