PulseAudio
Depending on which applications you use, you might need to provide PulseAudio
with a D-BUS session bus (e.g. via dbus-run-session
) or a D-BUS system bus
(via the dbus
service).
For applications which use ALSA directly and don't support PulseAudio, the
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio
package can make them use PulseAudio through ALSA.
The PulseAudio package comes with a service file, which is not necessary in most setups - the PulseAudio maintainers discourage using a system-wide setup. Instead, PulseAudio will automatically start when needed. If it is not starting automatically, it can be started manually by invoking pulseaudio(1) from the terminal as follows:
$ pulseaudio --daemonize=no --exit-idle-time=-1
On the other hand, PulseAudio can also end up being auto activated when it isn't
desired. To inhibit this behavior, the autospawn
directive from
pulse-client.conf(5) can be set
to no
.
There are several methods of allowing PulseAudio to access to audio devices. The
simplest one is to add your user to the audio
group. Alternatively, you can
use a session manager, like elogind
.