Comment 15 for bug 486154

One of the reasons I wanted to disable the PA bell was that it only fires about once a second (as discussed in bug #430203) when, e.g., you hold down the backspace key at a terminal prompt. I prefer the old behavior of the PC speaker of nearly-continuous beeping. When I first implemented workaround #1, I found the old behavior was restored.

However, after logging out and back in and re-enabling the beep, I found that it would only beep about once a second. Re-enabling and then disabling the PA bell again didn't change this - the PC speaker would still beep only once a second. Using xkbevd, I could see that bell events were being fired more rapidly that this; it's just that most of them would be ignored.

So I tried creating another, shorter audio file (0.1s) and placing it as bell.ogg. After deleting the cache file and restarting, this new sound was played for system bell events. But despite the short file length, it would still only be repeated about once a second. Deleting this file, I got the PC speaker repeating as rapidly as possible. But a log-out/log-in cycle changed that back to a PC speaker beep once a second! Note that this behavior is robust against deleting the cache file.

What seems to be happening is that the first time a given file is ripped out from under it, the PA beeper dies and the old beep behavior comes back. But the next time it happens, PA survives and rings the PC speaker itself. I can only assume that pulseaudio is learning, evolving, and slowly gaining sentience, and we must kill it now. With fire.