[LAU] setting fluidsynth as a service in debian/systemd

Len Ovens len at ovenwerks.net
Sat Oct 4 14:23:35 UTC 2014


On Sat, 4 Oct 2014, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:

> 
> On Saturday 04 October 2014 10:42:48 Federico Bruni wrote:
> 
> > Thanks, now systemd service is starting correctly, but something is wrong
> 
> > with fluidsynth command because I cannot hear any sound. Maybe some
> 
> > ALSA/Pulseaudio conflict?
> 
>  
> 
> Yes. In my opinion, the problem is that you are trying to start FluidSynth
> as a system wide service, while you are using PulseAudio which is an user
> session service. Pulse doesn't start until you log into your desktop
> session. On your Systemd scenario, you would need to run Pulse also as a
> system service starting before Fluid. That use case may be appropriate for
> servers, for instance when using Fluid as a reporting target for MonAMI
> sensors (http://monami.sourceforge.net). But for normal desktop usage, my
> recommendation if you wish to use Fluid as an always available service to
> other desktop applications is to start it as an user session service just
> like Pulse. To do so, follow the XDG autostart specification for
> cross-desktops:

I agree, running pulse as a system service is less than optimal and not 
recommended (by anyone as far as I can tell). The only reason to run audio 
programs as services is if you expect more than one person to be logged in 
at time and both to be using that audio program at the same time. Even in 
that case it may be easier to use two computers (to supply the two 
screens/keyboards/rodents without the extra setup mess) and use either 
netjack or pulse over net.

BTW, it is not hard to run jackd(bus) as the session sound server instead 
of pulse or along with pulse. That is what I do here. I use a script 
called autojack and an autojack.desktop file in /etc/xdg/autostart.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net


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