Bug 101662 – mpd won't play through esd

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Nick Colgan 2005-08-07 11:35:03 UTC]

To play through esd, the "ao_driver" option in /etc/mpd.conf is changed to
"esd". However, when this is done, the error "problems opening audio device" is
returned in mpd.error.log. The problem is that esd looks for (and creates, if
not found) ~/.esd_auth file and mpd runs as user "mpd" (created by portage) by
default and "mpd" (the user) has no home directory (or specifically, has a home
dir of /dev/null), so the file cannot be found/created. A quick fix/hack is to
change "mpd"'s home dir to /etc/share/mpd

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. emerge esd
2. emerge mpd
3. change "ao_driver" in /etc/mpd.conf to "esd"
4. /etc/init.d/esound start
5. /etc/init.d/mpd start
6. play song through mpd using favorite client
7. tail /var/log/mpd.error.log

Actual Results:  
mpd.error.log: 'Aug  7 12:42 : problems opening audio device while playing
"/mp3s/song.mp3"'

Expected Results:  
Not returned an error.

[Comment 1 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2005-10-16 14:02:23 UTC]

Could you try installing media-sound/mpd-svn with "ao" USE-flag disabled? There
is an unresolved issue, similar to yours on musicpd.org forums, where it's
indicated that it could be a libao bug.

Note that mpd-svn uses a slightly different configuration file format,
especially the audio output section.

[Comment 2 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2005-10-16 14:47:57 UTC]

Actually, nevermind - mpd user should really have a homedir other than
/dev/null. I'll change it to /var/lib/mpd, or something like that soon, also
changing default values of music_directory and playlist_directory in mpd.conf.

[Comment 3 Andrej Kacian (RETIRED) 2005-10-19 22:54:11 UTC]

Looks like someone already thought of this. I'm duping this bug, because the
other one was there first - I'll deal with the issue there.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 83644 ***