Hello, According to what has been described it sounds like timidity (which I don't even know what it is/does) uses alsa directly and happens to be able to open the sound device before pulseaudio manages to grab it.
>From what I'm hearing I'm willing to argue that this is not even necessarily a bug. This is how sound on linux works. You can only have one process using the sound device at a time (unless you have fancy soundblaster hardware which supports multiple streams at once). This is why sound multiplexer daemons (like pulseaudio, esound, pipewire, etc.) exists to begin with. While in todays modern times we expect everything to go via these sound multiplexers, but I'm not sure we can outright forbid software in the debian archive from not doing so. This just seems like a mis-configuration on the users part. (Any package in debian makes the assumption that if you install it you want to use it. Thus timidity behaves according to that. If you want to use pulseaudio instead, then you should stop timidity (or possibly uninstall it if you don't need it).) Bug reports with release-critical severity is supposed to reference the part of debian policy it violates. The "breaks unrelated software" justification was used, but I don't see how that's applicable. Similarly you could argue that any web server breaks all other web servers since they all try to listen on port 80 in their default configuration and only one of them can grab the port at a time. I doubt anyone would argue that's a RC bug. Hopefully there's a better default configuration timidity could use, but that's not release-critical in my opinion. Regards, Andreas Henriksson
