According to http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyalsaaudio the version 0.4 of pyalsaaudio is available since November. The latest version in Portage is 0.3; cf. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-python/pyalsaaudio. There's no specific problem with 0.3 for me, but the new version might contain updates to the ALSA API wrapper. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
+*pyalsaaudio-0.4 (02 Feb 2009) + + 02 Feb 2009; Patrick Lauer <patrick@gentoo.org> +pyalsaaudio-0.4.ebuild: + Bump to 0.4. Fixes #254912