Hello. How can I use ALSA as audio server instead of Pulseaudio?
In Phonon settings I only have Pulseaudio as an option. I've tried other players with ALSA and the sound is more pure than Pulseaudio so I would like to use Amarok through ALSA. How I can configure it? Thank you.

Well, yes, you can disable Pulseaudio by removing it from your installation, but we advise against that. If you use an outdated KDE, you might consider updating first, current in most distributions is 4.11.3 or even higher.

Thank you for your response. No remembered say that I use Amarok 2.8.0 in Ubuntu 13.10, if that can be part of the problem of not having ALSA as an option. I have KDE 4.11.2 and I not see in Synaptic option of a more recent version. If I uninstall Pulseaudio, ALSA appear as an option? Is not it possible to have ALSA as an option without uninstalling Pulseaudio? thanks

But why would you want to remove Pulseaudio? It interfaces with Alsa already, using Alsa alone doesn't work as well as with Pulseaudio.

personal injury lawyer wrote:Thank you for your response. No remembered say that I use Amarok 2.8.0 in Ubuntu 13.10, if that can be part of the problem of not having ALSA as an option. I have KDE 4.11.2 and I not see in Synaptic option of a more recent version. If I uninstall Pulseaudio, ALSA appear as an option? Is not it possible to have ALSA as an option without uninstalling Pulseaudio? thanks

I am also wondering if having ALSA as an option can remain without uninstalling Pulseaudio. If you have success can you please post? I am also curious. Thanks.

In order to function fully, Pulseaudio occupies all ALSA devices - so while it might be possible in theory, it is discouraged and applications in general will attempt to use Pulseaudio if it is present (and in many cases will fail to work if they cannot interact with it if it is running on your system).

My interest in Pulseaudio turn off is because it gives no good sound quality for connecting to a hi fi system, this is where the limitation of Pulseaudio, which is highly functional for audio level PC but not for hi fi systems.
There is a simple way to disable Pulseaudio without having to uninstall it:

in /etc/pulse/client.conf
uncomment "Autospawn" line and change it to "Autospawn = no"

after a "killall pulseaudio" and restart ubuntu, anymore Pulseaudio. You can back to it by edit the "client.conf" if you ever need in the future.

Amarok now sounds great without Pulseaudio, through VLC (phonon-backend-vlc better than Gstreamer)

There is another way to disable Pulseaudio, in theory, since I have not been able to make it functional, is BUM (Boot-Up Manager),
http://www.marzocca.net/linux/bum.html
in it figure as a service to disable Pulseaudio but to me, on Ubuntu 13.10, not disable Pulseaudio but if it works with other services, anyone with more experience have any ideas?