[pulseaudio-discuss] using pulseaudio with simultaneous playback from mutiple X sessions

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

I have two users on my laptop. When I start to playback sound from the session 
of the first user and then switch to the second user pulseaudio stops to play 
back sound from the first user. This way I also do not hear appointment 
reminders from the session thats currently not active unless I switch again.

Before using Pulseaudio sound from both sessions has been played 
simultaneously with Phonon + Xine. Now I am using Phonon + GStreamer, but I 
bet stopping the audio comes from Pulseaudio.

I read about system-wide mode. But first I shouldn't use it and second it 
doesn't solve this issue anyway, cause sound is still stopped. Maybe I missed 
setting autospawn on clients to off - cause I saw three pulseaudio daemons, one 
system-wide and two from the users -, but I do not like messing around with my 
Pulseaudio setup anymore - especially when its not recommended. Reason for 
trying Pulseaudio for me mostly was cause thats whats coming with Debian KDE 
standard install out of the box in the meanwhile.

So whats the official way to achieve what I had before out of the box? The 
default per-session handling of audio makes sense for unix users being used by 
different human users on a shared computer but it does not make too much sense 
for my use case.

Best way would be to tell pulseaudio explicetely when some Unix users may play 
simultaneously. Ideally it should still not allow recording audio streams from 
each other user. But for now I would be fine with a global option.

I found nothing on the wiki on that. And nothing really obvious via search 
engine either. I only found out that I am not the only user puzzled by this 
new different behavior to what I was used to before.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin Steigerwald - teamix GmbH - http://www.teamix.de
gpg: 19E3 8D42 896F D004 08AC A0CA 1E10 C593 0399 AE90