Re: [gentoo-user] Pure Data (Pd) can't access ALSA device

[Daniel Sonck]

This sounds pretty normal to me. ALSA isn't really suited for simultaneous 
audio access. In general with ALSA you have only one program that can use 
audio at a time, or you use the mixer module from ALSA. I assume a program 
running on the background has claimed ALSA already for certain reasons. 

If you run PulseAudio (which is pretty standard on a regular desktop), this 
one will be the cullprit. Usually the jack tools are smart enough to suspend 
pulseaudio. You can in fact run puredata through the pasuspend script which 
suspends pulseaudio so ALSA is free again.

What I recommend (which you already tried) is using JACK. JACK will take 
ownership of your ALSA device, and gives you a capable routing system allowing 
you to hook up more than just PureData to your audio card. Optionally routing 
it to other software. In addition, it's possible to compile pulseaudio with 
jack support which means you can in fact have regular (non-audio) apps work 
together with jack, which is what I sometimes use: Set up my audio studio 
setup, while still having pulseaudio around for stuff like browsers and video 
players. If I suddenly have a creative spark, I have my studio ready to play 
with. When I'm done, browsers still work with sound

Daniel

On vrijdag 22 september 2017 18:23:10 CEST Lasse Pouru wrote:
> I can't get Pure Data to work with ALSA. It detects my sound card, but
> whenever I try to turn on the audio I get the error:
>
> ALSA output error (snd_pcm_open): Device or resource busy.
>
> I've tried both using the ebuild from the audio-overlay and compiling
> from the source on the Pd website, both behave the same. I've read that
> Pd deals with ALSA differently than most other programs, but haven't
> found an explanation how. I did get it to work with JACK.
>
> - Lasse