How can I keep pulseaudio out of ALSA? [solved]

[Ant P.]

media-sound/pulseaudio has a nonsensical hard dependency on media-plugins/alsa-plugins[pulseaudio] if the alsa driver is installed, which makes pulseaudio try to take over everything, breaks alsamixer, renders my sound card's hardware mixing useless, etc.

I've undone this damage every update manually, by blanking out the /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/*pulseaudio*.conf files and setting chattr +i on them so they can't silently get back into my system, but this is a lot of hassle for something that shouldn't be forced upon users like this in the first place. Is there a better way to say No?

[PaulBredbury]

Why are you installing pulseaudio, if you don't want to use it?

Succumb to the Redhat Borg

[Ant P.]

Legit reasons: I want the per-app volume control on a few things, and it seems to be the only way to reliably screen-record with sound on my system.

For everything else I've got existing JACK/ALSA setups that I invested a lot of effort into and would rather not have this meddling with.

[ppurka]

That's the problem. pulseaudio has been written from the ground up to meddle with the whole audio stack. It should be possible to record using alsa directly, unless the recording functionality (i.e., recording the output) has been disabled in your sound card. This seems to be the case with most recent laptop sound hardware.
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emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using kde5 | e is unstable :-/

[Ant P.]

I've got a "real" sound card (output recording, hardware mixing, more than one samplerate). FFmpeg really doesn't like it though, I've tried dozens of setups using ALSA directly and they all give sound dropouts or crazy a/v desync issues.

Anyway I solved my actual problem... for now. I've put a pulseaudio ebuild in my local overlay without the broken dependency.