Hi, this patch adds an environment variable, ALSA_PLUGIN_DIR to allow it to find its plugins. This is especially useful in GuixSD where pulseaudio is used by most applications. When running an application that only knows about alsa, no sound can be output because the card is taken by pulse. One solution is to use the pulseaudio plugin from alsa-plugins:pulseaudio and setting ~/.asoundrc: # Default to PulseAudio pcm.!default { type pulse hint { show on description "Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)" } } ctl.!default { type pulse } But this results in an error because alsa will look for plugins in its own output directory in the store. With this patch, alsa is able to find its plugins in ALSA_PLUGIN_DIR after exporting it (export ALSA_PLUGIN_DIR=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/alsa-lib).