Comment 6 for bug 374059

On 31 July 2010 03:11, Rcart <email address hidden> wrote:
> In Lucid Lynx (at least with me), mpd plays music through pulseaudio
> correctly, but it appropriates of pulseaudio's output. So, while having
> mpd playing music, other apps cannot use pulseaudio output 'cause it's
> owned by mpd. And this was my workaround:
>
> Adding mpd user to pulseaudio groups didn't work. So, the simplest way
> was replacing the mpd user from the /etc/mpd.conf file by my user
> (rcart). After restarting mpd, it will claim 'cause the user has not
> permissions on the /var/run/mpd/pid file, and this is solved by changing
> the pid file owner to the user (in this case rcart).
>
> Those lines look like this:
>
> /etc/mpd.conf:
>       user                            "rcart"
>
> /var/run/mpd/pid permissions:
>       -rw-r--r-- 1 rcart root 4 2010-07-30 16:30 /var/run/mpd/pid
>
> Hope that works for those who have the same problem =)

While your method does work for the most part it can sometimes still
cause some issues with applications accessing pulseaudio.
The patch to mpd in Ubuntu that allows that to work is one I would
like to see dropped as running the mpd system daemon as a normal user
is not supported at all by mpd upstream.

If you want to run mpd as yourself the method I mentioned above is
much neater in my opinion. There are more detailed instructions for
how to do that on the gmpc wiki:
http://gmpc.wikia.com/wiki/MPD_INSTALL_USER_SERVICE_UBUNTU

--
Matt Wheeler
<email address hidden>