Sound in Skype via apulse

I have been using the 4.3 version of Skype for several months already, with PulseAudio and its compat packages installed. However, I experienced problems with some audio programs. XMMS would crash regularly and Clementine would refuse playing. Very strange, probably I did not configure PulseAudio properly. Anyway, I got rid of it and its dependencies, as well as their compat packages. Of course sound in Skype stopped.

I recently found out about apulse. It provides PulseAudio emulation for ALSA and does not require PulseAudio. Thanks to Ryan, it is now available at SBo.

I installed it on a multilib system, and following the instructions, I started skype like this:

apulse skype

Sound works again! I made a skype test call and could hear my voice back. Great. I therefore modified the skype.desktop file like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Skype
Comment=Skype Internet Telephony
Exec=apulse skype %U
Icon=skype.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Categories=Network;Application;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/skype;
X-KDE-Protocols=skype

Then, I saved it in ~/.local/share/applications/skype.desktop to make it available for my user.

UPDATE (16.02.2015): to start Skype on a Slackware64 -multilib machine, use apulse32 in the examples above. At the moment, the version of apulse is 0.1.5.

UPDATE (28.02.2015): with the newest at the moment version of apulse (20150103), the apulse binary works on a -multilib system by default. Therefore, use the instructions in the original post