[pulseaudio-discuss] regular user to open mpd user pavucontrol

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Martin Hamant at 28/08/12 10:00 did gyre and gimble:
> Hi !
> 
> I wanna make sure that my request is understandable -?  as English is
> not my native language it might be difficult to read, I can read that !
> 
> The point here is I would need my users (at least one) to be able to
> control mpd volume/routing properties, with pavucontrol
> 
> Thanks again !
> 
> Martin
> 
> Le 27/08/2012 12:23, Martin Hamant a écrit :
>> Hi there !
>>
>> I am working on a custom ubuntu distribution (based on lucid) that runs:
>>
>> - mpd - as mpd user - spawning it's own pulseaudio session.  (it is
>> the default configuration).
>> -  At least one regular graphical user that uses gnome and pavucontrol
>> ; who uses it's own pulseaudio session too.
>>
>> -  I want this normal user(s) to be able to control mpd's pulseaudio
>> properties !
>> - I don't want to run mpd as a 'normal user'  - for many reasons...
>> the main reason is there is only one MPD daemon but there can be
>> several 'normal user'. And it would requires editing the config file
>> afterward the first user creation.
>>
>>  By reading http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/PulseAudio
>> <http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/PulseAudio> and using 'sudo -s -u mpd -H' I
>> was able to use pacmd, but launching pavucontrol just returns
>> "connection refused". Any idea ? ( I also see that as 'mpd' user ,
>> strace'ing pavucontrol , it tries to connect to
>> /home/regularuser/.pulse/xxxx-runtime/native ... instead of
>> /home/mpd/...  ?)
>>
>> Any direction to achieve that ?

Sorry for the very late reply.

The chances are that the X11 properties on the root window are confusing
things here.

A good trick is to run: "PULSE_LOG=99 pactl stat" this is a pretty
simply "connect to the server and return some info" command and it
should print out some nice debug info that can help you work out what is
wrong.

Overall, I'm not sure how you're setting things up as obviously if the
regular user and mpd user both want control of the sound hardware at the
same time with their separate PA instances, it will cause significant
problems and basically one user is going to lose out on getting access
to the device unless there is hardware mixing involved. I appreciate you
say you want to run mpd with it's own PA, but you don't specifically
mention that you will handle things properly for ensuring only one user
(real or mpd) can access the audio h/w at any given time - just wanted
to make sure you didn't get tripped up by this problem.

Cheers

Col




-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

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