Sound disabled when another user is logged on with a Flash video in a browser

[Rykel from Singapore]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

Another user logs on to Ubuntu Lucid after I am already logged on, and uses a Flash video in a browser, such as Youtube.

He does NOT log out, and I resume my own login.

I will NOT have sound at all in my own logged in environment. But when the other user logs in and logs out of his account, sound will be resumed in my account.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Could you please check to see whether either of you are in the audio group? This can either be done from the user accounts dialog from system preferences, or in a terminal with the groups command.

If either of you are in the audio group, please remove that user from the audio group, as groups are no longer needed to manage sound hardware access, and the user being in the audio group is preventing things from working properly.

[Rykel from Singapore (rykel98)]

Thanks Luke. Indeed, one of the users is in the audio group, and upon removing him from the group, I was able to hear sound in my own account despite the 2nd user still hogging on to Youtube.

Can a fix for this buggy behaviour be released so that removing users from audio group becomes automated?

If I had not written here, I would not have known the problem nor solution.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

The best fix is for new users not to be added to the audio group when they are created. That is something that, I think, is worthy of an update for lucid. Maverick is going to get a new user dialog, and this will be fixed in the process of that dialog being reworked.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

One thing I forgot to ask you, is how you created that second user.

[Rykel from Singapore (rykel98)]

That sounds good. I created the user through System --> Users and Groups.

[Luke Yelavich (themuso)]

Ok, seems this issue has been fixed, which leads me to believe that your user was created prior to the fix going into lucid. The fix to not add users to the audio group was uploaded in March, so its taken care of.

 duplicate 433654