Does your MPD refuse to talk to your speakers?

In the process of doing some hardware upgrades here on Friday our router decided it was time to bite the dust, and after doing so many software installations and removal I decided to reinstall Ubuntu Hardy, get everything working again, and then upgrade to Intrepid. In the process of replacing our router we decided it was time to go wireless. My roomies still use Windows XP so there weren’t any issues on their end, but I wanted to make sure the wireless connection for my computer is one that Ubuntu will play with fairly easily. We decided on the Linksys WUSB600N Dual-Band Wireless-N USB Network Adapter, mostly because I had already seen a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about getting it installed.

That thread told me exactly what I needed to do, and mizunoX was kind enough to provide a .tar file for us to use in building the needed driver, as well as instructions for getting Ubuntu to get on the wireless ‘net automatically on each boot. I haven’t tried it yet to know if I’ll still have issues, but I’m seeing that it worked for others, and I may need to recompile the driver when I upgrade to Intrepid, but I have the info handy in case I do.

But I had one other issue that bugged the living daylights out of me. I rely on the combination of MPD and Sonata for most of my music listening and no matter what I did I couldn’t hear the tunes Sonata and MPD were playing. After uninstalling and reinstalling a few times and looking all over the place for a solution to my issue, all to no avail. I even found a configuration file that didn’t quite fix my issue, although it was a great help once I changed all of the paths to match my system and created a few more files and directories, but I still couldn’t hear a damned thing from MPD. That is until this morning.

This morning I discovered bug #192735 “mpd no access to soundcard using pulseaudio” on Launchpad, and comment 7 had one thing I hadn’t tried yet. (I’m not quoting the entire comment so you may want to go read the whole of what Josh Smith wrote.)

…

if you run mpd as a user, with settings:

user “ubuntu”

audio_output {
type “pulse”
driver “esd”
options “host=localhost”
name “esd”
}

…

I opened up my /etc/mpd.conf as root in my text editor and made those edits, other than setting the user as “ubuntu” because I just saw that line as I was writing this post. In a Terminal window I ran sudo /etc/init.d/mpd restart, then started Sonata and played a track. Finally I was able to hear music from MPD and Sonata.

I still have a few things I want to check before I make the upgrade to Intrepid again and install the video card I bought on Friday, but I’m holding off on those time consuming tasks until I blog some links I found over the weekend.