[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Halim Sahin]

Hello list,
Just my thoughts on this problem:
1. pulseaudio is now the prefered audiooutput system in most distros.
It brings great new features which are useful at all.
I like the feature mooving streams from one audiodevice to another. This
makes using of headset comfortable and is realy useful.

2. many applications are now writing native pulse drivers. They will
stop writing alsa drivers at a time we don't know.
This will happen if pulseaudio is more stable.

I have two use case where pulseaudio makes thing not better:
1. Accessibility 
You all know of the outstanding latency problems (which are now fixed
using the simple pulse api) and adjusting the pa_buffer_att.*.
A speechserver shouldn't run as user because some times it's useful to
read some boot messages.
Or are you turning on your monitor after login :-)?
Unfortunately you are always writing that running pa as systemservice
will not supported at all and should be avoided.
The distributions are integrating pa this way and don't care about
console users.

2. When I decide to run some daemons like asterisk or mpd etc with 
other uids this is a problem for pulseaudio.

The Problem can be summarized in one sentence:
Pulseaudio currently breaks multiuser systems and is only useful for
one-user-desktop.
Running more pulse servers at a time can work but is difficult for
setup.

Regards
Halim

@Lennart
DMIX is enabled in alsa since 2.6.16 and works user independend.
I can run my speechserver with uid speechd and run mplayer on my halim
useraccount at the same time.
an alsa application which uses directly the hw0,0 device will block
dmix.
When apps use alsa:default all works fine over dmix.