Separating Skype and PulseAudio

Earlier: Skype and PulseAudio

Skype and PulseAudio have never really seen eye-to-eye on my netbook. Maybe if you have some kind of magical super computer that can manage more than 1.6GHz you don’t have this problem, but for us mere mortals it’s a pain.

PulseAudio is hammered into Ubuntu pretty hard by 11.10. Removing it, as I have discovered, tends to break certain things and leaves you entirely without any method of volume control. Yes, I know you can hack something together with keyboard shortcuts, but I like the little speaker icon. So PulseAudio is something I’ve grudgingly learned to live with.

Skype is not quite so grown up. In fact, I believe this applies to any kind of microphone usage where PulseAudio is immediately infected with a nasty case of “the stupid” and gobbles your CPU leaving none left for the application actually doing the recording.

Audio devices? What audio devices?

So then along came pasuspender.  ”pasuspender skype” used to be a lovely way to set PulseAudio aside to one corner so it wouldn’t get in the way of Skype using the proper audio devices. Except the latest version of Skype (or the latest version of PulseAudio, hard to say) broke it. Skype no longer displays a list of sound devices if you have PulseAudio, it just sees PulseAudio and (if you suspended it with pasuspender) makes no noise whatsoever. See this blog post for Skype’s poor explanation of this horrific behaviour.

Sub-optimal, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But further down that blog post, (in the comments, since Skype employees are rarely as helpful as the users) you’ll find this little gem:

===================== WORK-AROUND =====================
set PULSE_SERVER to 127.0.0.1 and run Skype. PulseAudio doesn’t listen on TCP by default, so 127.0.0.1 is a good choice for most users – it will get an instant connection refusal and fallback to ALSA.You can also add a shortcut in GNOME to do this instead of using the command line. Drag-copy Skype to your panel, then in its preferences use a command:
/bin/sh -c “PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1 skype”

Probably worth noting in some FAQ/HOWTO. This is much better option than uninstalling PA completely.

Oh, those audio devices!

There you have it. This gets my “dirty hack of the week award”, if such a thing were to exist. You’re telling Skype there’s an audio server it can talk to on 127.0.0.1 (there isn’t) and it promptly goes to look for PulseAudio at 127.0.0.1, doesn’t find it and just uses the proper audio devices (127.0.0.1 is running PulseAudio, but not listening on the network by default). You’re basically lying to Skype, saying its friend’s outside, and shutting it out in the cold.

Thanks, lamieur!

You monster.

So load up alacarte, change the Skype entry to run this:

/bin/sh -c "PULSE_SERVER=127.0.0.1 skype"

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