Rid thyself of that pesky PulseAudio daemon in Arch / Manjaro Linux

I have a very lightweight system -- a laptop from 2008 -- that usually works quite well until PulseAudio gets in the way of things.

Here are some tricks to disable PulseAudio:

1. Edit /etc/pulse/client.conf and add the line:
   

   autospawn = no

2. If you want to go "the whole nine yards" and uninstall PulseAudio entirely, you can build a Gnome package that does not depend on PulseAudio:
   

   yaourt -S gnome-settings-daemon-nopulse

3. Next, you can entirely remove packages that depend on PulseAudio:
   

   pacman -R pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa lib32-libcanberra-pulse lib32-libpulse manjaro-pulse xfce4-volumed-pulse skype

   Note that Skype 4.3 requires PulseAudio. Therefore, you have little choice but to remove it.

No monitor device on USB sound card? No problem.

My USB sound card doesn't have a "monitor" mixer device. In other words, in order to listen to audio that is being recorded through my speakers or headphones, I need to record and play back that audio.

PulseAudio makes this somewhat easy using module-loopback, although the method is esoteric, so here are the applicable commands.

In order to figure out what input and output devices to use,

pactl list | grep -1 State

You should see a number of sources and sinks. The key piece of information is the Name: field, which allows us to specify which device to use in the loopback chain.

In my case, my source device is oss_input.dsp2, and my sink device is oss_output.dsp2. Therefore, I can load the appropriate module:

pactl load-module module-loopback source="oss_input.dsp2" sink="oss_output.dsp2" latency_msec=1

An ID number, corresponding to the module ID, is returned on the command line. When you want to unload the loopback module, supply this argument to This is the argument to pactl unload-module

There is a bit of latency using this method, but at least I don't have to involve a hardware mixer in my set-up.