On 11/22/17 21:59, Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 22 November 2017, David A. De Graaf sent:
I've fought with this miserable pulseaudio creation for several
years, trying to get sound to work *properly*, but this is the
last straw.
I can't say I've had any real problems with it.  I used to have lots of
problems with what was used before pulseaudio, whenever two things
wanted to make a sound at the same time, the first one prevented the
other, then they might jam each other up when the first thing had
finished playing.

I'll ask the obvious question:  Do you do fresh installs, or update
Fedora over the top of prior installations?

I ALWAYS do fresh installs.  Updates seem a bit risky for my taste.  I maintain two root partitions, 1 /home and 1 for /boot/efi.  Then I format the older root and freshly install the new Fedora there.

One consequence was that the newly installed pulseaudio-11.1-6.f27 could not be downgraded.  So I removed it altogether and found that sound worked just fine.

By fine, I mean, for example, that scripts that generate sound can be invoked by any user, in any environment:  In /etc/rc.d/rc.local during boot by root, in a plain text terminal, in an X window by any user, including root, in a crontab job run by any user.  Here's a simple example :

***   /usr/local/bin/beep   ***

NBEEPS=${1:-10000}
REP=`expr $NBEEPS - 1`
/bin/play /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/message-new-instant.oga \
    gain -0 pad 0 .4 reverb repeat $REP  2> /dev/null

Try it.  It ought to work in any of the above situations.
But it won't if pulseaudio is in the picture.

The pulseaudio designers know what you want better than you.

-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad@datix.us         www.datix.us