Protip: use pulse on top of jack. I can't get to my PA config right now, but the gist is 1) copy the default config to ~/.pulseaudio 2) edit out the device au

Protip: use pulse on top of jack. I can't get to my PA config right now, but the gist is 1) copy the default config to ~/.pulseaudio 2) edit out the device autodetection and add in loading just the jack module 3) if you have more than a single device, either add it to the pulseaudio config (i.e. bluetooth comm device for use with skype) or use alsa_in and alsa_out to connect an additional alsa device to jack, then add the device to the pulse config as an additional source/sink pair 4) keep the default alsa device pointing to an alsa-pulse bridge. Yes, this sounds crazy when you can just layer alsa on jack rather than on pulse->jack, but this way you get the per-application volume controls, which are one of the few really good features of pulse. If you don't care for per-application volume controls, just layer alsa on top of jack directly. With this setup, pulse acts as a simple bridge to jack and jack does a much better job of controlling your sound card, remixing, etc. I have a hunch that the absolute single best sound setup on linux would involve patching jack to basically act like pulse w.r.t automatic device management and then add the native pulse protocol to it.