On 2009-10-03, Nick Guenther <kou...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 4:18 AM, <shweg...@gmail.com> wrote: >> hello, >> while I see there is some talking about aucat, I'd like to pose a question >> myself. >> If I use aucat -l and then play multiple sessions of, say, mplayer, >> everything is fine, but if I start mpd while running aucat as server, mpd >> refuses to start. >> Is it possible to make mpd use aucat? Or should I use mpd to do the "aucat >> -l" job? (to be able to hear, for instance, incoming messages from pidgin). > > aucat locks /dev/audio while it's running, and a new sound API, sndio, > is used to intelligently detect whether aucat is running or not and > route audio to it or to the soundcard directly. The (huge) downside of > this is that there is no drop-in solution that lets you have audio > shared between any and all apps, each one must be hacked to support > sndio as a backend, and mpd hasn't had this work done yet as far as I > know. > >
mpd uses libao which was has been converted. Most audio software in the ports tree does now use sndio. The problem with mpd is it runs as a different user - the directory containing the aucat socket is created with restricted permissions. (Wondering why? Maybe you don't want someone who managed to connect to your laptop to access the microphone...) So after running the aucat daemon, you need to loosen the permissions (e.g. chgrp _mpd /tmp/aucat-`id -u`; chmod 770 /tmp/aucat-`id -u`). You probably want to symlink the directory to the name mpd will use by default too (/tmp/aucat-560, named after the uid).
