sound doesn't work until I login

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 08 Sep 2016 17:12:15 +0300, Thierry Andriamirado wrote:
>Le 8 septembre 2016 09:39:13 UTC+03:00, Karl Auer
><kauer at biplane.com.au> a écrit :
>
>>No browsers. No GUI. No screen, no keyboard, no mouse. No users, no
>>logins, no sessions. Just music.
>>  
>>> However, wouldn't it be the easiest way to wait until startup
>>> finished and start playing music after the user session started?  
>>
>>Listen carefully: There is no user session :-)  
>
>So what you needbis just plain ALSA. Without pulseaudio, which you
>have to desactivate.
>
>And IF one of these days you need both playing music without session
>AND sound during session, you'd better install and use jackd v2. It's
>a very capable, professionnal sound server which allows bridging with
>ALSA apps and even with pulseaudio.

Jack has some disadvantages for user who aren't interested in audio
productions. Bridging is possible and even while jack doesn't resample,
it is able to use helpers for doing this, too. However, users who aren't
doing audio productions, not always considered jack a user-friendly
sound server. Apps could have a bad jack implementation, if any,
audacity is well known to be a PITA, when using it with jack. Some apps
might require pulseaudio, IIRC skype can't be used without pulseaudio.
The advantage of jack, sample accuracy, is completely irrelevant for
most users. Btw. I don't remember that I ever heard before, that dmix
can't be used with all audio devices, I always thought it especially is
made for usage with cheap audio devices. But dmix and other ALSA
plugins are for sure not that user-friendly in regards to the needs of
most users, as pulseaudio is. In short, for many users pulseaudio
likely is the best way to go, OTOH as soon as audio should be fishy,
the first thing I recommend to do, is to temporarily disable
pulseaudio, to see, respl to hear what's happening after it was
sweep out of the way.

Regards,
Ralf