[pulseaudio-discuss] Apps playing through PA do not show up in pacmd or pavucontrol

[Timothy J Massey]

Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote on 07/01/2009 06:27:03 AM:

> 'Twas brillig, and Timothy J Massey at 01/07/09 06:28 did gyre and 
gimble:
> > Hello!
> > 
> > I have a MPD session playing through PulseAudio.  The *only* 
audio_output 
> > in the mpd.conf looks like this:
> > 
> > audio_output {
> >         type "pulse"
> >         name "MPD Player #1 via PulseAudio"
> >         sink "mpdplayer1"
> > }
> > 
> > I start MPD and play something, and it plays properly.  HOWEVER, 
> > PulseAudio shows no evidence that MPD is actually playing through it. 
For 
> > example, if I use pavucontrol and display the Playback tab shows 
"System 
> > Sounds" only.  No MPD.  Or, if I use list-sink-inputs from pacmd, it 
tells 
> > me that there are *0* sink-inputs!
> 
> Sounds like you're running mpd as a different user and has it's own 
> pulseaudio daemon process running. Your user is connecting to it's 
> session of pulseaudio.

It turns out that that is *exactly* what was happening.  A pulseaudio 
daemon was spawning running as "mpd"...  Sorry for the noise.  System mode 
is looking better and better... :)  The system is supposed to run headless 
eventually anyway.

> I'd imagine Ubuntu is using the old interrupt driven mode whereas Fedora 

> is using glitch free and your card's h/w driver doesn't support that. 
> Compare the default.pa on each distro and see if there are any 
> differences. I suspect the Ubuntu one will have tsched=0 passed to 
> module-hal-detect.

It does.  And Fedora does not:  It was on my list of things to figure out.

> HTHs

Yes, thank you.  I very much appreciate your help.

Tim Massey