[Nix-dev] Getting pulseaudio to play nicely with MPD

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

Greetings,

As OSS is not packaged (yet), ALSA and pulseaudio seemed like the next
step. As usual with pulseaudio it means a lot of tears.

After a while I managed to have separate ‘mpv’ instances to play
together nicely by using an override with pulseSupport = true.

I have a problem if I try to use ‘mpv’ and MPD at the same time however.
If I'm using MPD then ‘mpv’ can't get access to audio (and the video
doesn't play more than 1 frame at a time but that seems to be ‘mpv’
bug). Likewise, if ‘mpv’ is playing, MPD won't be able to gain audio.

The problem is that I can't get MPD to use pulseaudio. Everywhere on the
net we can find that we need something like this in our config:

audio_output {
  type "pulse"
  name "MPD pulseaudio"
}

but if I do that, I just get:

fatal_error: line 139: No such audio output plugin: pulse

and MPD doesn't start.

For reference, maybe somewhat strangely, something like

audio_output {
    type "oss"
    name "MPD oss"
}

plays sound (but exhibits the problem mentioned). I found this out by
accident as I was re-using a config file I was using on a system with
OSS. Perhaps some emulation is going on or something.

Did anyone manage to set up MPD with pulseaudio on NixOS? The pulseaudio
NixOS wiki pages aren't exactly full of content so I'm a bit lost here.
There seems to be nothing like pulseSupport optional flag for the mpd
package.

-- 
Mateusz K.