Description of problem: My audio used to work perfectly. I have some monitors connected to my sound card's IEC958 out and a speaker in the bedroom on the analog "Front" out. The kernel driver is smart enough to use the PCM mixer as a software volume control for the IEC958 when it's enabled. This means I can set the level just once, not every time an application opens the audio device. Now that pulseaudio is installed by default, something has changed and I don't see how to make it go back. Under System|Preferences|Hardware|Sound, I can disable "Enable software sound mixing (ESD)", which will (misleadingly) disable pulseaudio. If I also select "PCM" on the devices tab, then I get my system-wide PCM mixer back. However, only apps that output to alsa will pay attention to this mixer. If I'm using OSS audio output, the level gets reset every time. Also, with this configuration, when I use Volume Applet to adjust the volume, my music skips. Especially if I move the control very quickly. I get the impression that I am now using some sort of alsa user-space software volume control, which does not work as well as the kernel-space software volume I used previously. Bottom line is that if there were a bunch of alsa changes to support pulseaudio, I need to know how to back that out. Thanks!
There is not any change in ALSA for the pulseaudio support. (at least any fedora specific). What "kernel-space software volume" do you mean?
Well, I don't know the full answer to your quetion, but I was able to find the following note at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Changes_v1.0.15rc2_v1.0.15rc3 Sound core - Remove the built-in software volume control in favour of softvol. Perhaps it's now automatically inserting softvol into the chain, for any iec958 output? I will post to the alsa-user list about this.
(In reply to comment #2) > Sound core > - Remove the built-in software volume control in favour of softvol. > > Perhaps it's now automatically inserting softvol into the chain, for any iec958 > output? That's possible. Anyway, did you tried to remove pulseaudio?
I disabled it in gnome-sound-properties, but that made no difference. You think I should try removing the package?