OK, I’ve got a Debian 7 on my laptop with a 64 bit OS. I want to install skype.

In the old days the Skype guys used to distribute a 64 bit package, nowadays they think it’s not needed anymore so you’re stuck with the 32 bit version. Why producing the 64 bit package (probably because they still have a 32 bit source code) when 64 bit OS’s are able to run the 32 bit software? This seems to be the philosophy.

There’s a number of steps involved in the use of the brand new version (32 bit) provided by the skype dev team which I couldn’t go through.
However I have a legacy 2.2 version of skype compiled for 64 bit that would occupy the audio server and would crash if anyone else tried to output some sound.

The simple solution is to add this to the ~/.asoundrc

pcm.!default plug:pulse
plug.pulse{
type pulse
}