Comment 14 for bug 503780

"just add a file to your home folder name .alsoftrc and inside put "drivers=pulse"

this fixed the problem for me and proves that the default behaviour is wrong and needs to be fixed!"

This actually *broke* openAL for me!

What I did: Edited ~/.openalrc and added the line "drivers=pulse" (the existing drivers line is commented out).

Launched gmplayer, set audio preference to OpenAL. Restarted gmplayer.

Loaded an MP3 file. Pressed Play.

Observed PulseAudio Manager opened a new sink named "Playback Stream", with gmplayer as owner.

Observed gmplayer froze completely. No response from UI whatsoever. No sound from gmplayer.

Killed the sink using PulseAudio Manager. This unfroze gmplayer. Pressed Play again, and observed the same indications again. Killed the sink, then changed gmplayer's audio prefs to use Pulse directly. Pressed Play again, and gmplayer played normally.

This is with libopenal.so.1.10.622

$ ls /usr/lib/libopenal*
libopenal.so.1 libopenal.so.1.10.622