Chromium prefers ALSA over PulseAudio?

[Christoffer Aasted]

Hello everyone. I'm hoping someone can answer me this since I'm basically pulling my hair out thinkink about this one and why.

Normally PulseAudio autospawns when needed and plays trough it also. It does this for almost any other app unless they are not supported by pulseaudio.

For Chromium. It does not spawn it unless it is forced to do (via config below) - and neither does it play trough pulseaudio afterwards.

# .asoundrc

pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    # no fallback means chrome is forced to start and run through pulseaudio
    #fallback "sysdefault"
    hint {
        show on
        description "Default ALSA Output (currently PulseAudio Sound Server)"
    }
}


ctl.!default {
    type pulse
    # no fallback means chrome is forced to start and run through pulseaudio
    #fallback "sysdefault"
}

Now PulseAudio is started when trying to play media, but it still plays through ALSA.

It only ever uses PulseAudio if PulseAudio is started before starting Chromium.

Is this intended? Does Chromium prefer ALSA? Is pulseaudio only partially supported (through pulseaudio's alsa plugin) ?

There are some desktop environments that auto-start pulseaudio through scripts in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ or /etc/xdg/autostart - but since pulseaudio should be able to autospawn this is irrelevant, but still useful information, since I use the i3 window manager which does run any of both without manually specifying it in .xinitrc.

[Henrik Andreasson]

Hi Christoffer,

it might be a bug. Could you please file an issue at crbug.com.

Thanks