[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Markus Rechberger]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> 'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 27/11/09 09:13 did gyre and gimble:
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 'Twas brillig, and Markus Rechberger at 27/11/09 05:54 did gyre and
>>> gimble:
>>>>
>>>> right now I'm experiencing that mplayer just mutes after a few
>>>> seconds, when I start up pavucontrol audio starts to work again.
>>>> See this is what I mean when writing about that Pulseaudio does not
>>>> work correctly with most distributions (Ubuntu is known to have
>>>> issues, although pulseaudio is configured to run per user, no other
>>>> process is accessing pulseaudio, nothing is bypassing pulseaudio
>>>> either here).
>>>
>>> mplayer -ao alsa? or mplayer -ao pulse? I suspect the former as we're
>>> currently debugging a problem relating to the alsa-pulse plugin shipped
>>> in
>>> alsa-plugins package. So this is in the process of being solved.
>>>
>>
>> both...
>>
>> after restarting the PC with alsamixer the device was muted (I haven't
>> looked
>> close enough before rebooting if it was muted..), maybe pavucontrol
>> unmuted it but this doesn't explain the
>> weird behaviour why audio worked somewhat for 1-10 seconds without
>> running pavucontrol.
>
> Are you really talking about mute here or do you just mean the audio stops
> working? If ti's really muting then something is pretty bizarre. Pulse wont
> automatically mute anything (well module-cork-music-on-phone could cause
> e.g. skype to cause music applications to be muted while it's outputting
> sound etc.)

The first behaviour this morning was that mplayer muted after 2-10
seconds this morning
The second behaviour after rebooting the PC was that audio didn't work
because the alsa
device was muted. I do not know if the first one is also somewhat
related to the second behaviour
and pavucontrol might have unmuted it this morning (after closing
pavucontrol sound muted again -
without changing anything in pavucontrol itself).
Whereas the second behaviour is actually known that it might happen
with Ubuntu 9.10
I will do some more experiments when I have some more time for it..

Markus