Does anyone know of a set of power-saving guidelines for ALSA anywhere? For example...
If you are not playing sound, you should not be drawing significant power. The good question to ask yourself is : can I measure my power consumption. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil is also true when it comes to power consumption.
If you can't measure it, then you will probably optimize the wrong thing.
What you should aim for is looking for anything that will keep your processor awake. Are you looping for some variable to be set, or are you waiting for an interrupt ?
How often do you write to your sound device ? Can you increase the buffers and reduce the number of wite ? Is your hardware automatically taking care of this ?