[pulseaudio-discuss] “Failed to open audio output” error when trying to send audio from mpd to pulseaudio

[Fred Hamilton]

Hi Folks...hoping you can help a user troubleshoot a pulseaudio problem.  I
originally posted this on askubuntu (
http://askubuntu.com/questions/544925/failed-to-open-audio-output-error-when-trying-to-send-audio-from-mpd-to-pulsea)
but it doesn't look like the necessary experts are there.

I have never been able to get mpd and pulseaudio to work together on my
system, from Ubuntu 12.04 (and probably earlier) to 14.04 today.  They seem
to work fine independently (mpd with alsa, pulse with VLC, web browsers,
and everything else), but when I try to send audio from mpd through
pulseaudio, mpd reports "Failed to open audio output".  Here's what I know:

- Software is Ubuntu 14.04, pulseaudio 4.0, Music Player Daemon 0.18.7
- Pulse seems to be working fine since VLC lists all my pulse sinks and can
play sound through any of them.
- mpd works fine if I send the output through alsa instead of pulse
- Both mpd and pulseaudio are running under my user (fred) according to top
and the System Monitor GUI.
- fred, mpd, and pulseaudio are all members of the pulse, pulse-access, and
audio groups.

My mpd.conf file is pretty vanilla; the pulse section is the generic:
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "General Pulse"
}

I've tried it with and without the alsa output also enabled, and I also
tried specifying sinks directly in mpd.conf, but I always get the “Failed
to open audio output” error as soon as mpd tries to enable the pulse output.

I've tried uninstalling and/or purging pulse and/or mpd many times.  I've
disabled or deleted any config files I can find so they can be regenerated
when reinstalled.  However I noticed that when I reinstall pulseaudio it
does not recreate the ~/.pulse directory or that directory's contents, so I
reuse that directory and its contents, but I think the settings are the
defaults.

Other things that may or may not be pertinent:
These utilities work: pacmd, pavucontrol, paprefs,

These just hang: padevchooser, pasystray, paman, pavumeter

pasystray returns:
** Message: PulseAudio terminated!
** Message: reconnecting...
** Message: pa_context_connect() failed:
** Message: Connection refused
** Message: pa_context_connect() failed:
** Message: Connection refused

I think I have something wrong with the local networking on my box -
internet is fine but php and some other things using localhost are wonky.

Sorry for the long post.  Any help much appreciated.

-Fred
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