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I am trying to run MPD server on Ubuntu 12.04.3. All worked with Ubuntu 11.10 and even with earlier 12.04. I am using Sonata as frontend and i get connected, playlists are available, i can choose a song, play it -- except getting audio out. Sound system is based on pulse-audio.

MPD has pretty good Wiki and pulse-audio configuration is covered too. I have tried debug my problems, but still did not get working.

What i have? I have:

  • mpd daemon working with started pulse-audio, in 

    $ ps aux | grep -i mpd
mpd      13770  3.9  5.4 144500 13636 ?        Ssl  Sep13 331:18 /usr/bin/mpd /etc/mpd.conf
mpd      13778  1.4  1.0  88516  2532 ?        Sl   Sep13 119:21 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

  • In /etc/mpd.conf i have 

    audio_output {
        type            "pulse"
        name            "MPD PulseAudio Output"
        # sink      your-sink-name-here"
}

  • for sake in /etc/pulse/client.conf i enabled autospawn ( already default?): 

    autospawn = yes

  • in /var/log/mpd/mpd.log i see played songs

  • under user "mpd" i can play music with mplayer and it works well with pulse-audio

I can't get

  • list of sinks under usual user or mpd:

    $ pacmd list-sinks
No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.

  • any sound from mpd-server

In syslog i see, that pulse can't connect to d-bus, like:

    Sep 19 20:43:23 musa pulseaudio[787]: [pulseaudio] module-always-sink.c: Unable to load module-null-sink
    Sep 19 20:43:54 musa pulseaudio[1098]: [pulseaudio] server-lookup.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11
    Sep 19 20:43:54 musa pulseaudio[1098]: [pulseaudio] main.c: Unable to contact D-Bus: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unable to autolaunch a dbus-daemon without a $DISPLAY for X11

How to get mpd working again?

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3
  • It looks like you need either to tell mpd which pulseaudio sink to use or setup pulseaudio to use the right sink by default. pulseaudio errored while trying to load module-null-sink, but even if it had succeeded this sink just silently throws audio data away, so that is not what you want. What is the output of pacmd list-sinks?
    – wingedsubmariner
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 2:35
  • @wingedsubmariner: yes, this may be a problem, but a) output of pacmd list-sinks is in my posting and b) mplayer plays well under ordinary user and under mpd-user too. I see that there is a problem connecting to D-BUS.
    – wk.
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 16:30
  • Having exactly the same problem in Arch linux. pulseaudio processs is running and Kodi can output sound to it, but mpd does not and I cannot get a list of sinks.
    – Budric
    Commented Oct 28, 2015 at 15:41

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I am using Archlinux, not Ubuntu but I had the same problem. Apparently, the reason pacmd list-sinks didn't work is because apparently environment DISPLAY needs to be set (forum discussion). After I set this for the user I could get list of sinks. I reconfigured systemd mpd.service to start mpd as my user and set Environment="DISPLAY=:0".

Unfortunately this implies user has to be logged into an X session, and the system has xorg installed. I think you can re-configure PulseAudio to run as a daemon for the entire system but with possible security issues (aside from this blurb I don't know specifically what they are)

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1
  • For me was solution to turn back to Alsa. But I hope your solution will help those who run mpd on desktop. For server I don't use X.
    – wk.
    Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 20:36

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