This sounds pretty normal to me. ALSA isn't really suited for simultaneous audio access. In general with ALSA you have only one program that can use audio at a time, or you use the mixer module from ALSA. I assume a program running on the background has claimed ALSA already for certain reasons.
If you run PulseAudio (which is pretty standard on a regular desktop), this one will be the cullprit. Usually the jack tools are smart enough to suspend pulseaudio. You can in fact run puredata through the pasuspend script which suspends pulseaudio so ALSA is free again. What I recommend (which you already tried) is using JACK. JACK will take ownership of your ALSA device, and gives you a capable routing system allowing you to hook up more than just PureData to your audio card. Optionally routing it to other software. In addition, it's possible to compile pulseaudio with jack support which means you can in fact have regular (non-audio) apps work together with jack, which is what I sometimes use: Set up my audio studio setup, while still having pulseaudio around for stuff like browsers and video players. If I suddenly have a creative spark, I have my studio ready to play with. When I'm done, browsers still work with sound Daniel On vrijdag 22 september 2017 18:23:10 CEST Lasse Pouru wrote: > I can't get Pure Data to work with ALSA. It detects my sound card, but > whenever I try to turn on the audio I get the error: > > ALSA output error (snd_pcm_open): Device or resource busy. > > I've tried both using the ebuild from the audio-overlay and compiling > from the source on the Pd website, both behave the same. I've read that > Pd deals with ALSA differently than most other programs, but haven't > found an explanation how. I did get it to work with JACK. > > - Lasse
