[pulseaudio-discuss] Sound not working

[Andrew Eikum]

On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 08:35:40AM -0800, James Board wrote:
> >Your problem is not pulseaudio, it's your audio system below that. And by attacking pulseaudio developers >or me (I am a pulseaudio user and linux system administrator, no developer) you will not change that. 
> 
> I didn't attack pulseaudio developers.  I only suggested that they create a trouble-shooting page for people to solve simple problems like playing music files.
> 

Skipping the silly analogies for a moment, let's find out why you
don't have permission to access the sound devices.

On my system (results truncated):

  $ ls -l /dev/snd
  crw-rw----+ 1 root audio 116,  7 Dec  3 06:59 controlC0

The device is owned by root and in group 'audio' and has owner:rw and
group:rw permissions.

  $ groups
  network video audio optical storage power users

This shows my user is in the 'audio' group, so I have permission to
read/write the control device. As a result, PulseAudio is able to open
the device and play audio for me.

What's different on your system?

Andrew