[Bug 210472] Re: Timidity daemon doesn't play nice with pulse audio

[Daniel Ellis]

I have been testing this on Karmic and so far have come up with the
following conclusions (please correct me if any of these are not
correct):

- Out of the box timidity and pulse audio cannot play at the same time.
- Restarting timidity (sudo /etc/init.d/timidity restart) gets timidity to work again for a short while, until pulse audio takes control again.
- Timidity does not appear as an application within Sound Preferences.
- Timidity is started with the system
- Timidity runs as the user 'timidity'.  It no longer runs as root.
- Pulseaudio runs as the logged in user.
- The 'timidity' user is a member of the 'audio' group and is not a member of the 'pulse-access' group.

I thought that adding the timidity user to the pulse-access group was
going to be the answer.  Sadly not, as timidity still didn't show up as
an application within Sound Preferences.

The command I used was:

  sudo usermod -a -G pulse-access timidity

I then tried running timidity at the command line.  So first stopped the
timidity daemon and then started it in a shell:

  sudo /etc/init.d/timidity stop
  timidity -Os -iA

Which works. The Sound Preferences window includes the application "ALSA
plug-in [timidity]", and both midi and audio from other application play
together nicely.

So I then tried to start timidity in the shell as the 'timidity' user to
see if that worked:-

  sudo -u timidity timidity -Os -iA

The output of which was:-

======================================
No protocol specified
XOpenDisplay() failed
Home directory /home/daniel not ours.
W: core-util.c: Failed to open configuration file '/home/daniel/.pulse//daemon.conf': Permission denied
W: daemon-conf.c: Failed to open configuration file: Permission denied
Requested buffer size 32768, fragment size 8192
ALSA pcm 'default' set buffer size 30104, period size 3760 bytes
TiMidity starting in ALSA server mode
Opening sequencer port: 128:0 128:1 128:2 128:3
Requested buffer size 32768, fragment size 8192
ALSA pcm 'default' set buffer size 30104, period size 3760 bytes
======================================

This failed to connect to pulseaudio correctly.  To resolve the
permission denied errors, I added rwx permissions to /home/daniel/.pulse
using:

 chmod o+rwx ~/.pulse

Now timidity starts without the permission denied errors, but still
fails to connect to pulse audio correctly.  I don't understand what else
is needed to get a process to connect to pulse audio from a different
user id.  Any ideas?

-- 
Timidity daemon doesn't play nice with pulse audio
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/210472
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs at lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs