I found Pulseaudio to be a bit of a pain, it would constantly sit using 100% CPU and seemed to mess up sound constantly. I decided to purge it from my system and stick with plain ALSA.

Removing [OSBOLETE]

NB This is obsolete, seems PulseAudio is used for most things these days.

I found the following recent thread on audio problems with very useful input from the legendary Neddyseagoon on how to remove Pulseaudio.

Check what currently depends on pulseaudio

snippet.bash
equery d pulseaudio

Add USE=-pulseaudio to your /etc/portage/make.conf. Make a backup of the pulseaudio install, just in case you want to reinstall it

snippet.bash
quickpkg pulseaudio
# Restore with
emerge -K1av  pulseaudio

Now re-emerge @world with the new USE-flags…

snippet.bash
emerge -uDNav @world

Finally remove pulseaudio…

snippet.bash
emerge -c pulseaudio

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