[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[David Csercsics]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 04:51:25PM +0800, Markus Rechberger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been working quite a while with pulseaudio, one thing that breaks
> alsa compatibility is that since PA is user based root is not allowed
> to access audio.
> This always worked with native Alsa even if root is not in the audio group.

I have a similar question here. What should i do if I need to
configure things so that sound can play as root as well as my normal
user and [preferably before I log in. It is considered incorrect to run
pulseaudio in system wide mode and I don't know that I want to take the
performance hit anyway. If it matters I don't habitually run X. I bring
that up because it seems pulseaudio interacts quite a bit with hal and
the X sessions among other things and this case is not covered in the
documentation exactly. I'm running this on my laptop so it's not really
the embedded case that system mode is designed for but I'd like the low
power and hotplug parts of pulseaudio and better mixing than dmix to
try to get some more or less useful music playing out of the laptop. The
laptop is currently running Fedora but help that is not distro specific
would be useful because I sometimes need to fix other Linux boxes and
I'm not loyal to any particular system. And I just like to learn how
things work. I'm just a little bit confused about how this is supposed
to work. Thanks for reading this and I'll play around with it a bit more
myself and see if I can hack something up.