If you like alsa, dislike pulseaudio, and need sound in firefox, then you will love
apulse!
apulse is a wrapper script that provides "pulseaudio emulation for alsa" to the wrapped application only. It is very easy to use:
$ tce-load -wi apulse
$ apulse firefox
I'm a grumpy dinosaur (don't like pulseaudio or dbus), so my calls to firefox are actually like this:
$ apulse dbus-run-session firefox
With this command, I get sound without pulseaudio
and dbus goes away when firefox closes. Pretty sweet.
I hope this helps other grumpy dinosaurs.
P.S. apulse is a brand-new extension and will be in the TCL11 64bit repository soon. If you use a different version of TCL, apulse is trivial to compile (see here:
https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse).