[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Markus Rechberger]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 5:27 PM, David Csercsics <aarg at shaw.ca> wrote:
> 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.

As a workaround I configured it to run as daemon, but this brings up
another problem..
The flash plugin is able to interfere and mute pulseaudio occasionally
... the applications (eg.
mplayer) don't show up anything strange but audio is mute for it...
Now someone could say it's the fault of the flash plugin (it obviously
is..) but since pulseaudio
tries to make things better it should try to do so for this one too...
(I never had things act like
this without Pulseaudio), other issues I'm still investigating ...

Markus