eenie-meenie-miney-pulsaudio

i'm using ubuntu 16.04, and while pulseaudio works on about 90% of the software installed on the system, there's a maddening 10% of things that just plain don't work. using padsp helps with some of them, but others just don't seem to be able to connect to pulse in any way whatsoever. this is getting frustrating... audio doesn't work with WINE, it doesn't work with several ham radio programs. i've also installed jack, and jack itself doesn't work.

You might use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

It would have been helpful if you had listed some of the items that aren't working properly.

Do you have pavucontrol (the pulse audio mixer) installed? It's in the repos.

It provides much more granularity in the controls and may allow you to resolve your issues.

JACK takes a little bit of setup to work in Ubuntu.
If you really need or want to go that route, I strongly recommend installing the kxstudio PPA.
http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Repositories

Cadence is a "must have" for an easy GUI interface that can start JACK on boot.
On top of that, for everything to play nicely together, you will want a pulseaudio to JACK bridge.
This takes some config changes to some files found in /etc/pulse.
These are the settings I use.
client.conf: https://pastebin.com/8spBjWcG
daemon.conf: https://pastebin.com/5UL6HiVZ
default.pa: https://pastebin.com/gGeYU4Nk
system.pa: https://pastebin.com/ZzVGZVAx

Group permissions:

audio:x:29:pulse,timidity,slacker
pulse-access:x:126:slacker

So you want your user(s) to be a member of pulse-access and audio.

Then you want to fire up Cadence and make it look something like this setup:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...1&d=1528764314


Reboot and Cadence should load JACK and Pulseaudio bridge automagically.
And you can do cool things like insert audio effects racks into the system...
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...1&d=1528764314