Replace PulseAudio with Alsa?

Can anyone please teach me how to replace the default PulseAudio with ALSA? I’ve read the forum items relating to this as well as the relevant articles on Archwiki, but the matter is simply beyond me.

My issue: I have installed BibleWorks 10 through Wine and it is working fine except for the (Hebrew and Greek) audio not playing. I have browsed the issue over the internet and the problem seems to be related to PulseAudio and the solution seems to be to bypass PulseAudio and use ALSA directly. I believe I have confirmed this, because BibleWorks 10 works perfectly in Linux Mint (19.3 and 20), including the audio functionalities. Linux Mint uses ALSA. I was running LM 19.3 before turning to EOS, and am multibooting with LM 20 and Artix Linux just for the purpose of testing BW10. Artix fails BW10, too, and it also has PulseAudio by default.

So, I wish to use ALSA rather than PulseAudio to see if I can then have the BW10 audio working in EndeavourOS as well as it does in Linux Mint.

Help, please.

OK. This has not attracted any response of any kind. In the meantime, I am having an uneasy feeling that I may have stumbled on a taboo topic hinted at by this from the manjaro forums as an aspersion “on pulseaudio/systemd”:

Anyway, I tried the suggestion by the same poster of the above image and followed the instructions in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio/Examples#PulseAudio_as_a_minimal_unintrusive_dumb_pipe_to_ALSA.

In the end, one thing in the instructions I could not do: get rid of pulseaudio-alsa either by commenting /etc/asound.conf (file does not exist in my system), or by uninstalling it (pacman refuses to becuase “removing pulseaudio-alsa breaks dependency ‘pulseaudio-alsa’ required by cinnamon-settings-daemon”).

So, seems nothing going with EOS-Cinnamon. I believe this is not a Cinnamon issue per se, as this issue does not affect Linux Mint Cinnamon. If I remember right (it seemed ages ago) I did not have this issue in EOS-KDE, the first DE I had but changed because in the end I found it more fancy than efficient.

This is just to document my experience here, in case anyone else in the world is interested.

TL;DR: Solution to the issue is ditch your app or ditch EOS-Cinnamon-PulseAudio.

All we expect is courtesy and respect and this would be a great place to learn about the Linux world.

As to the lack of response it is probably due to the fact the everything here has pulseaudio installed by default. I’m guessing 95% or more of the users have no problem with pulseaudio.
It appears that you only have one app that doesn’t work with pulseaudio.

According to Bibleworks home page, As of June 15, 2018 BibleWorks ceased operation as a provider of Bible software tools. We made this announcement with sadness, and thankfulness to a multitude of faithful users who have stayed with us for a large part of their adult lives.

Since BibleWorks ceased to exist two years ago, help on this issue won’t be available there. The pure fact of the matter is a lot, if not most of BibleWork’s dependencies have been updated to the point where eventually it won’t work with any Linux distro. Plus the fact that this is running through wine further complicates the issue.

Since this is a pulseaudio based distro, if you have a distro such as Linux mint that runs it, that may be the best and easiest solution to continue using BibleWorks.

There may be someone on this forum who knows how to eliminate pulseaudio, maybe patience will prevail.

Pudge

Sorry, my bad. I did not realize that the photo I reposted here was discourteous or disrespectful, or that it touched on a sensitive issue in the Linux world. I’m glad @BONK quickly took the proper step to correct my mistake. I’m still new to Linux and am getting rather overwhelmed by so much info and know next to nothing about pulseaudio or systemd or most anything. One thing I am sure of, though: if Linux did not have a forum as helpful and as kind as the EOS forum, I am sure I would not have dared struggling on learning Linux.

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As the saying goes, you have to learn how to walk before you can learn how to run. Nobody is born with an innate knowledge of Linux. Patience and baby steps are the best approach to learning Linux.

Pudge

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And I thank EOS for guiding me through my baby steps.

I am still quite bothered, though, not knowing what exactly I have done in reposting that photo. So, I’ve read up on things more, and I now think it has to do with /dev/null. Wikipedia says it is some technical joke, but I gather from it that it is equivalent to saying something is garbage? Now, that is really offensive! And, now, I can’t thank @BONK enough for quickly stepping in.

I have to say it says so much about EOS and the EOS forum that it cares about … well, that it cares!

TL;DR: EOS teaches respect and Llinux.

Hey :slight_smile:

I have some background in professional audio, including heavily using Wine for it…

Well, that issue looks really weird, and i don’t think it’s caused by pulseaudio, Bibleworks 10 according to winehq should work out of the box, maybe that functionality in question is a problem on itself (since it’s just couple of languages affected)…

Questions:

  1. Do you use pure wine directly or it is PlayOnLinux or something like that?
  2. Have you used winetricks or some custom overrides inside your wine prefix where you’ve installed Bibleworks 10?

Overall i’d recommend not to replace pulseaudio with alsa (it certainly won’t help here, because pulseaudio is basically just more convenient way of streaming alsa)…

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Really that’s it!

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Thanks for clarifying things for me.

I’ve come to this conclusion, too. I’ve realized that Linux Mint also uses pulseaudio (with alsa) and BibleWorks works perfectly in it.

I used only pure wine, no winetricks or PlayOnLinux. I wouldn’t have minded BW10 not working on wine in EOS, because my preference really was to run it on Win10 on EOS vitualbox, thinking this would be the more secure way. But I found virtualbox in EOS very buggy, and the slightest movement of the mouse frequently froze my system, requiring hard reset. In the end I have decided to follow @Pudge’s advice:

I am now running BibleWorks on Win10 virtualbox in Linux Mint 20, where it works perfectly without freezing issues. It also works perfectly on Wine in LM20, but as I said, I believe (I am not even sure of this) virtualbox is safer.

There may be some way to make BibleWorks work in EOS, but I see this is a very complex problem, too advanced for newbie me. So, the way for me is to take baby steps, as @pudge advises, and for now Linux Mint 20 paves the smoother path.

I really appreciate your reply, though, and the helpfulness of the EOS forum.

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