[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 03 January 2010, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>'Twas brillig, and Gene Heskett at 03/01/10 17:48 did gyre and gimble:
>> And it seem like a doable, sane approach to the problem.  A voice of
>> sanity midst the riot this could become.
>>
>:)
>:
>> But that still leaves PA's biggest problem for this user:  It picks the
>> most obviously wrong choice in available audio outputs, whether they
>> exist or not in the hardware (in my case they don't physically exist),
>> and I have not found a way around that yet.  A default install of mdv2010
>> on another drive here is silent, the only thing heard when booting it is
>> the thump in the speakers as udev starts & loads emu10k1.
>
>I'm a bit confused bu your mail to be honest. Can you explain what you
>meant a bit about which of your devices it's choosing? Do you have
>multiple sound cards?
>
Colin, I have posted several times about this, and usually simply ignored.

And yesm there are, according to the bus scanning done at bootup, 3 separate 
audio systems in this machine.

1.  There is an intel-hd or whatever its called, claim from my video card 
that has no connection to the physical world that I can find, on my rv610 
chipset based video card.

2. There is another intelhd chipset on the mother board that I suppose might 
be able to make a few pitiful squeaks should I ever plug any amps & speakers 
into it, and before PA, I was able to dedicate it for use by skype, but not 
since PA arrived.

3.  I have a 24 bit Audigy2 Value with about 64 i/o's that I use for 
everything because it never runs out of headroom.

>pacmd ls output would be good.

[root at coyote etc]# pacmd ls
E: pacmd.c: No PulseAudio daemon running

However, from an lspci -v:
01:07.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB0400 Audigy2 Value
        Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 1001                           
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 17           
        I/O ports at 9c00 [size=64]                                    
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2                  
        Kernel driver in use: EMU10K1_Audigy                           
        Kernel modules: snd-emu10k1 
[...]
03:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV610 audio device [Radeon HD 2400 
PRO]
        Subsystem: Diamond Multimedia Systems Device aa10
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
        Memory at fddfc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [58] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
        Capabilities: [a0] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ 
Count=1/1 Enable-
        Capabilities: [100] Vendor Specific Information <?>

The motherboard audio system is not found specifically because I build my own 
kernels (currently running 2.6.32 final) and do not build its driver, 
therefore simplifying the problem at the expense of losing skype, and that is 
a shrug, as it's just a toy to annoy verizon with anyway.  I do that on 
general principles anyway. :-)

And when booted to mdv2010-x64, PA picks the video card device & I've used 
every pa utility I could find to try and get it away from the 2nd device 
above and bring some audio back to life, with no apparent effect.  Also, 
booted to mdv-2010-x64, the only place I can see the Audigy card is in lspci 
and possibly dmesg.  PA's tools can't find it.

>Col
>
I'll reboot and see what I find & report shortly.


-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)

For every credibility gap, there is a gullibility fill.
		-- R. Clopton