I have read a lot of material available to me on the Internet, and I am still not sure about what PulseAudio's main purpose is...

Is PulseAudio's main purpose to primarily function as a "mixer" and allow many different sound sources to be combined into a "single" set of outputs such as a multi-channel room stereo, or is PulseAudio capable of functioning as a Master Studio console that might be used to support several (many) different rooms all with different content?

I have a need for a simple (normal) stereo set-up to handle normal system sounds, along with an occasional audio feed from the Internet, while allowing several communication radios to feed separate, independent, digital audio tones to one or more software programs used to decode those tones. In the future, I might want to have the same computer system also handle the audio for an entertainment room audio system.

I currently have multiple sound cards, each connected to a specific communications receiver, for the purpose of creating "digital audio" that can be passed to appropriate software programs.

For my current purposes, the built-in default sound card is adequate to support system sounds, and the normal audio created by some websites, such as news broadcasts, pod broadcasts, advertisements, etc.

the first extra sound card is a Sound-blaster and it is "permanently" connect to a monitor receiver.

The second extra sound card is an external USB card and it is connect to a communications transceiver.

I also have a couple of PCI cards that a audio and/or audio/video sources.

In the future I may acquire additional external USB sound cards for connection to other communication transceivers.

And at some other time in the far future, I will set up an entertainment room, which will need to support streaming video to that location only.

One of the catchers here, is that from time to time I will need to dynamically reconnect the digitalised audio from a particular receiver and "patch" it to a different software program.

From what little I know, it sounds like PulseAudio & Jack would provide the capabilities that I need. But I kept reading that these products do not behave well together, and I have also read the PulseAudio and Ubuntu don't always do what the designers intended. (???)

- - - -

As you can well imagine, one the problems that I am currently having is that PulseAudio / Port-audio / ALSA / whatever, generally latches on to the "hardware" and will not let it go... ...making switching difficult.

Every time I come up with a "solution" Ubuntu issues a new kernel and/or new versions of some software, and I get to start all over again.

- - - -

 Does anybody have any recommendations or suggestions?

 Thanks
 /s/ Bill Turner, wb4alm
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