Comment 12 for bug 374059

> I don't believe that mpd has such "build default" settings (and I
> don't really see a pressing need for it to start having them).

If you look at the source, you can see that in the absence of a sound output configuration, audio_output_detect calls ao_plugin_test_default_device for each output plugin that has a test_default_device handler.

The order in which the plugins are given is simply that in which they are listed in output_list.c. There, you can see that alsaPlugin is listed before pulse_output_plugin. Hence, on Ubuntu, ALSA is preferred to PulseAudio.

That is what I meant by a build default.

Now to be clear about what I want: what I am trying to achieve here is an mpd package which does not require user configuration to work on a default Ubuntu install (which the current system does, as a default Ubuntu install uses PulseAudio, while mpd defaults to using ALSA). mpd can be packaged in such a way that a user does not need do anything other than install it to use it; I'm just trying to get closer to that goal.

Currently, there are two ways in which mpd can be used on Ubuntu: as a system server, or per-user. Both can be made to work by default with (per-user) PulseAudio. As explained on

http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/PulseAudio

if mpd is run in system mode, then the mpd user needs to be a member of the pulse-access group to be able to access the user's PulseAudio daemon. (You mention above that "I have found this can cause other issues with pulseaudio, and isn't recommended by the pulseaudio devs." If that is still the case, please can you explain the problems and point to the advice, as the wiki page referred to above clearly needs updating.)

On the other hand, if mpd is run in user mode, it can access PulseAudio already. Both these can be achieved by adding a PulseAudio configuration stanza to /etc/mpd.conf. Maybe it is worth considering making this the default mode of operation of mpd in any case: most users, whether on single-user or multi-user machines, are likely to want to play their own music collections, not some central collection, and running per-user mpd instances also reduces the likelihood of security problems.

> Potentially what you want could be achieved by setting
> MPDCONF=/etc/mpd.conf-system or some such (see /etc/default/mpd), and
> using /etc/mpd.conf for normal user instances of mpd, but this assumes
> that every user wants exactly the same configuration for their
> individual mpd.

In fact, the situation is better than this: mpd searches first for a per-user configuration file (actually not ~/.mpdconf as mpd(1) says, but ~/.mpd/mpd.conf), and then for /etc/mpd.conf. Thus, users who want different settings for their individual mpd have only to write a ~/.mpd/mpd.conf exactly as at present. Any user who already has a ~/.mpd/mpd.conf file will not be affected by the change I propose.

> Perhaps issues with pulseaudio should be documented better in
> mpd.conf's comments, or an alternative example .mpdconf could be
> provided with the package, and mentioned in README.Debian?

There's no need: there is no issue other than one of default configuration. We can have our cake and eat it here.