pulseaudio deeply unreliable (Fedora 10)

[stan]

Phil Meyer wrote:
> Because 'pulse' and alsa can co-exist, setting the music player to alsa 
> stops the skipping, but no other audio will work at the same time, 
> sometimes causing a flash player or pidgin, or other app to crash as a 
> result.

I think you can just create a .asoundrc in your home directory that makes dmix or speex part of your default and this 
mixing will occur automatically in alsa as well.  I don't have one, so can't post details, but that is theoretically 
supposed to work with alsa.

pcm.!default {
   speex
   plughw:0,0
}

might work.  And might not.  :-)

> 
> I have tested this extensively with several music players, and set to 
> alsa, they consume less than 5% CPU, and set to pulse they use 17%.
> Set to alsa they perform flawlessly, while blocking all other audio.
> 

Your symptoms sound like you have pulse running at a different frame rate than the music.  Thus it is doing on the fly 
resampling.  This would explain the high cpu usage.