Ubuntu
alsa-plugins package

  1. Bug #1296425
  2. Comment #30

Comment 30 for bug 1296425

Revision history for this message
Luke Yelavich (themuso) wrote : Re: [Bug 1296425] Re: pulseaudio is started twice - effectively making device management impossible.

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 04:26:16PM AEST, Martin Pitt wrote:
> I don't know why aplay invokes pulseaudio (that seems wrong, as
> pulseaudio usually uses ALSA as a backend), but if passing on the
> environment (for DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS etc.) helps, I'm fine with
> doing that. The main reason for passing an empty environment was to
> ensure that this does not use any localization.

Aplay invokes pulseaudio because if you have pulseaudio installed, ALSA is configured to send its audio via pulseaudio, so you can get individual volume control for ALSA apps. Since pulseaudio is not running, pulseaudio gets spawned. An alternative way to solve this would have been to set the environment variable PULSE_INTERNAL to 0.