Finally made the switch to jackd which works so much better than Pulseaudio. Ubuntu did not make this easy, but with some perseverance it works. One of the things I really hate about Pulseaudio is that when I click on a new song in audacious it would take about 1 second before the audio stabilized. Also with flash audio would stutter for the first few seconds.

First (if you don't care about gnome-desktop):

apt-get remove pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils

I'M pulseaudio FREE!!

Then followed this.

Install jackd and friends, read this, and try:

jackd --verbose -d alsa -r 44100 -d hw:1

(You might need hw:0 instead of hw:1 - I have two sound cards)

Now the hard task of making alsa work with jack. You are missing libasound_module_pcm_jack.so in Ubuntu...

This does not work on Ubuntu - you need to custom build your own libasound2-plugins package. You can get my 32 bit (Intel) versions of them here lib64asound2-plugins1.0.18-1ubuntu4i386.deb and libasound2-plugins1.0.18-1ubuntu4i386.deb

Custom libasound2 package

Prerequisites

apt-get install libjack-dev
apt-get build-dep libasound2-plugins
apt-get source libasound2-plugins

Now, the plugins aren't build with jack support - go figure. So you'll need to edit debian/rules in alsa-plugins-1.0.18/. Uncomment all the jack stuff you see, except the following:

# install $(INSTALL_UAG) jack/.libs/libasound_module_pcm_jack.so \
#   debian/libasound2-plugins/usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_jack.so.2.0.0
# ln -s libasound_module_pcm_jack.so.2.0.0 \
#   debian/libasound2-plugins/usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_jack.so

After this you can build the package with:

sudo dpkg-buildpackage -b -us -uc

Now you only have to take care of starting a jack-daemon on your desktop start up and you are back in audio heaven.