Replace Pulse Audio with ALSA

Posted by 7sins|Linux, OS|4 Comments

With the launch of Karmic Koala, the Ubuntu developers have forced the Pulse Audio down our throat. The net result being a lot of my apps have broken their voice.

For instance just after I upgraded to Karmic, and tried to play my Music collection on Exaile, Rhythmbox, Banshee I saw a strange thing.
The first song would play perfectly fine. Next the OSD would show that the second song has started playing. The progress bar would also confirm that. But there was NO SOUND. It was dead silent. No amount of tinkering solved the problem.

A little searching also suggested that that Pulse Audio was the culprit.

So the only option was to ditch Pulse Audio in favour of ALSA.

The following steps show how to do it :

1. :~$ sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio
   

2. :~$ sudo apt-get autoremove
   

3. :~$ sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-tools alsa-tools-gui alsa-utils alsa-oss linux-sound-base alsamixergui
   

4. :~$ sudo apt-get install esound esound-clients esound-common libesd-alsa0 gnome-alsamixer
   

5. Now restart your PC
6. Set the defaults to ALSA.

   :~$ gstreamer-properties
   

Now we are left with ALSA without any applet to control the audio. Instead of that we have got gnome-alsamixer to control the volume.
To access the ALSA mixer go to

Applications > Sound and Video > GNOME ALSA Mixer

Here is a screenshot of the GNOME ALSA mixer location

With ALSA installed my music played perfectly fine like it should have played in the very first place.