OK, I have not been able to solve my pulse dropouts (professionally
faded out and in, but very noticeable nonetheless - they're about a
second or less in duration, essentially random intervals between
dropouts), so have spent today trying to get jackd to work:
I use qjackctl.
I've disabled pulse from xfce session, sudo service pulseaudio stop,
insserv -r pulseaudio, killall -9 pulseaudio.
ps aux | egrep -vi disk\|gvfs | egrep alsa\|jack\|pulse\|mix\|vol
gives a nice, clean output.
BUT, when I run qjackctl (no command line options), it starts up and
auto-starts jackd as well as pulseaudio.
How can I stop this from happening? I want to test jackd/qjackctl by themselves.