Gstreamer alsasink not working when jackd is off

Question

I'm pretty new to all this so I'm very confused.

I had a gstreamer pipeline setup with the out sink being jackaudiosink while also running jackd using /usr/bin/jackd -R -P10 -dalsa -dmaster -p512.

I'm now trying to remove jackd and directly send the audio out to alsa so I'm using autoaudiosink instead of jackaudiosink as the out sink. The thing is if I stop jackd I hear nothing from my speakers. If I have jackd running then I hear the audio. So I'm guessing the way I set up alsasink is incorrect?

Also when I set my alsasink device to the following hw:999 it still works as long as jackd is running. I thought hw:999 would be invalid.

        pipeline = "rtpopusdepay ! opusdec ! audioconvert ! audioresample";
        out_sink = gst_element_factory_make ("autoaudiosink", "out_sink");
        g_object_set(out_sink, "device", "hw:999", NULL);

        media_bin = gst_parse_bin_from_description (pipeline, TRUE, &error_handler);
        gst_bin_add_many (GST_BIN (pipe1), media_bin, out_sink, NULL);

I'd really like some docs to understand what I'm doing. Any help will be appreciated.