Comment 26 for bug 1296425

The aplay call was introduced in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jockey-hackers/jockey/trunk/revision/519 for bug 295158. Apparently some sl-modem types don't appear in /proc/asound/cards. It's indeed a strange hack, but so is sl-modem in the first place :) Beyond that bug report I'm afraid I have no idea about this -- I never had such a modem, and thus I don't have the opportunity to test any change.

I don't know why aplay invokes pulseaudio (that seems wrong, as pulseaudio usually uses ALSA as a backend), but if passing on the environment (for DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS etc.) helps, I'm fine with doing that. The main reason for passing an empty environment was to ensure that this does not use any localization.