sound doesn't work until I login

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:21:26 +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
>I'm starting to understand why Ralf doesn't like pulseaudio. It is not
>easy to use and is very poorly documented. I still have no idea how I
>can control the sound from outside my script. Luckily I don't need
>to...

It's not important that I indeed dislike it, more important (to me) is,
that I don't need it. To mix several sound sources for real-time
productions I need jackd, a sound server that doesn't provide features
that are provided by pulseaudio, but OTOH a sound server that is
designed for sample accurate real-time audio usage. Apart from audio
productions I don't need audio very often. If I need audio for averaged
desktop applications, then just one app at a time. Sometimes I have bad
luck, since I might run virtualbox, it grabs the sound device and
while running a virtualbox session I perhaps decide to listen to
something by Firefox, but then it doesn't work. Even such situations
could be handled without pulseaudio, but I didn't set up something to
do so, because usually I don't need it. I keep audio as simple as
possible and to fit best to my needs. I guess a lot of apps work very
good by auto-connecting to pulseaudio and AFAIK pulseaudio allows to use
sources with different sample rates. OTOH I doubt that it makes sense
to use it with pro-sumer and professional sound cards, that often
anyway require special mixers and that come with features no averaged
audio device has got.

Regards,
Ralf