Comment 81 for bug 579300

I vote for restoring ALSA's OSS emulation module to the official kernel, and blacklisting it by default. If there was a separate package, I think it would inevitably get out of sync.

I am also dealing with this bug because of MythTV. Personally, I believe MythTV's 0.23's backend is broken in regards to audio _input_, though the frontend supports audio _output_ just fine when it's set up to use ALSA redirected through PulseAudio.

Like mythfrontend, it is often possible for ALSA programs to play nicely with PulseAudio. Most people should probably have an /etc/asound.conf file like this:

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}

An ALSA program will read that file and realize it should redirect output through PulseAudio instead of talking to the hardware device directly. ALSA hardware devices (stuff in /dev/snd/*) can still be accessed directly if the programs are set up correctly and PulseAudio is deciding not to interfere. For instance, I can record audio with ALSA's "arecord" utility with "arecord -f dat -D hw:0,0 testfile.wav". I can also make arecord suck data through PulseAudio with "arecord -f dat -D default testfile.wav", and it works. Many people who have issues beyond that simply need to unmute their sound cards -- this can be accomplished by starting "alsamixer", pressing F6, selecting the appropriate hardware device, and changing the volume settings.

Unfortunately, some programs just don't work with ALSA, preferring to just operate with OSS-style devices. As I said, mythbackend seems to be one of those programs. I agree with yota that MythTV is a "killer app" for Linux and Ubuntu. If it doesn't work, it makes the entire platform unattractive to many people -- including myself, and I've been using Linux since 1996.