#904098 pulseaudio: Pulseaudio only provides Dummy Output until timidity is killed

Package:
timidity
Source:
timidity
Description:
Software sound renderer (MIDI sequencer, MOD player)
Submitter:
Sam Imberman
Date:
2021-01-25 16:27:04 UTC
Severity:
important
Tags:
#904098#5
Date:
2018-07-19 15:34:02 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

I'm reporting what appears to be a problem with either pulseaudio, timidity, or
both. The nature of the bug is that pulseaudio does not work until I kill
timidity. Notably pavucontrol shows no outputs, and GNOME's sound control panel
shows only a dummy output. If I execute 'service timidity stop', then suddenly
audio output works fine again.

The computer is a Thinkpad T430.

I'm a longtime intermediate-level Debian Testing user but this is the first
time I'm
reporting what seems to be pretty clearly a bug, so please bear with me! I have
seen references to similar bugs on various forums, but I didn't find anything
in the Debian bug tracker.

I am attaching a debug-level log of pulseaudio (sudo journalctl -b | grep
pulse), but please let me know if any logfiles would be interesting.
#904098#10
Date:
2018-07-24 11:15:43 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

I can confirm this bug also occurs for me after upgrading yesterday. I am
running a Dell Inspiron 7559.

Regards,
Frankie
#904098#17
Date:
2018-08-15 22:51:31 UTC
From:
To:
This is a multi-part MIME message sent by reportbug.
#904098#22
Date:
2019-04-11 20:28:53 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

just needed to thank you for reporting this: I just upgraded my system
to Buster (as it is freezed, I hoped for the best) and the only sound
output in KDE system manager was 'dummy', no audio output. Removing
timidity got audio back working.

Now I'm not able to change audio output through system tray icon or even
system manager: changing audio configuration is possible only through
Pavucontrol.

Definitely an annoying bug!

Kind regards

Marco
#904098#27
Date:
2020-01-31 11:54:53 UTC
From:
To:
Reassigning to timidity as it is claiming the device for itself. Quoting
full bug below for context.
timidity, or
panel
suddenly
first
I have
anything
LANGUAGE=en_CA:en (charmap=UTF-8)
#904098#36
Date:
2021-01-24 22:05:42 UTC
From:
To:
I have also found that timidity is blocking access to
the alsa plughw device.

This may perhaps be the underlying problem with pulseaudio although
as I only use alsa I cannot comment on that.

Trying to open the alsa device returns a "Device or resource busy"
error.

It is possible that an asoundrc configuration
https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Asoundrc
might help.
#904098#41
Date:
2021-01-25 16:22:29 UTC
From:
To:
After a little further investigation, I found that timidity
was being started by systemd by falling back to /etc/rc*.d/ SYSV
files.

Note that I had removed timidity-daemon, but I did not purge
the package. As a result, it seems that timidity was being
started:

# systemctl list-units "timidity*"
  UNIT             LOAD   ACTIVE SUB     DESCRIPTION
  timidity.service loaded active running LSB: start and stop timidity

So if you have had timidity-daemon installed at some point, then
be sure to purge the package.

I see that timidity "Suggests" timidity-daemon, although it is not
needed in desktop installations. I imagine that it how it got installed
here some years ago.

The other issue is why timidity is locking out other sound applications
from using plughw:. Perhaps that would be reasonable when
timidity is actively playing sound, although I think most sound
aplications are not so antisocial. I have not looked at that aspect so
far.