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

[Timothy J Massey]

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!

However, it seems that MPD *is* playing throuh PA.  For example, if I use 
pacmd to mute or change the volume of the sink, the MPD music is affected. 
 Or, if I kill pulseaudio and restart the MPD server, it will not play, 
and I will get an error in /var/log/mpd/errors.log saying that it could 
not connect to the PulseAudio server.  So it *sure* seems that MPD *is* 
playing through PA.  So why don't I see it in pacmd or pavucontrol?

This has happened more than once under both Ubuntu 9.04 fully-updated, and 
Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 2, not updated.  Given the problems I've been having 
with 9.04, I'm giving Karmic a shot:  2.6.30 kernel and PA 0.9.15.  Does 
anyone have a suggestion for a better distro to try?  Fedora is *not* a 
better distro:  while Ubuntu uses ~50% CPU to play a single MP3 stream 
through PA, Fedora 11 is *choppy* and at 100% CPU for the *same* 
*thing*...

Tim Massey