At Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:04:46 -0500, Pierre-Louis Bossart wrote:

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Another approach would be to set the stream to mute when paused and let the codec do the amp power check which will power it down if needed. What do you think?

PulseAudio and other equivalent layers don't pause the output. They close the ALSA sink after a timeout and reopen it when the sink/Hal state change. You may want to avoid working your tail off with a seemingly smart way of using the paused state, if in the end it's not that useful...

Indeed, there are only few apps that use the pause operation, so it won't a big win in comparison to the added code complexity.

thanks,

Takashi