audio access

[Mark Greenwood]

On Wednesday 09 Jun 2010 18:53:39 Ric Moore wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-09 at 18:01 +0100, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> > On Wednesday 09 Jun 2010 05:33:24 xPol wrote:
> > > Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > > > and, apparently, pulse audio? Then the KDE, etc. apps will access
> > > > the sound devices indirectly through a pulse audio daemon and have
> > > > permission that way. I guess the daemon either filters other users or
> > > > provides an environment variable which can only be accessed from
> > > > within the session started by KDM/KDE.
> > > > 
> > > >> Anyway, i will add users to that group and see
> > > 
> > > It doesn't work
> > > I have checked that user belongs to the 'audio' group, then
> > >   % dbus-launch konqueror
> > > 
> > > youtube videos are displayed, but no audio
> > > Maybe a reboot is needed? 
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > >> l /dev/snd/
> > > > 
> > > > If you use "ls -l", you'll see that the group is "audio", meaning
> > > > that any user in that group will be able to access the device
> > > 
> > > yes, the group is 'audio'
> > > 
> > > What should i do with the Pulse audio sound system? 
> > > Is it needed?
> > 
> > Pulseaudio in Kubuntu is very broken (and not supported by the Kubuntu devs). It's a shame, 'cos it's really good...
> > 
> > However to answer your question, no you don't need it. Also, permissions for accessing pulseaudio are quite complex - I think the user needs to be in the 'pulse-access' group, but I think there might be other things you need to set up as well. Easiest to just remove it.
> 
> When I did a fresh install of Lucid, I installed the Gnome version
> first. Pulse actually worked!! THEN I installed KDE. It still works.
> Will miracles not happen?? I've despised Pulse for some time and ranted
> bitterly against it. But, it's working now without all the hiccups it
> had in the past, ...or else it's KDE's handling of it. So, to put it to
> rest, I installed Gnome first, as a test. It would seem, from what I've
> experienced, that letting KDE install it first is problematic. Ric
> 

That's not actually the issue.. it does "work" under KDE, but what you'll find is that all the applications are using the ALSA-pulse plugin instead of using pulse natively. This breaks some of pulseaudio's most useful features. In normal circumstances you won't notice much difference, but there is a big latency overhead and a small CPU overhead.  Secondly you can't use KMix to adjust application volume and routing on a per-app basis like you can in other distros. This is all to do with the way Kubuntu package the phonon part of KDE, and isn't likely to be fixed. In other distros it works beautifully - and has done for a couple of years.

Mark