Sound Device Permission Problems

From Music Player Daemon Community Wiki

Many people have come in lately with problems pertaining to their sound device not having permission to play sound. This is not a MPD specific problem, and truthfully offtopic, but we try to help as possible.

If that doesn't work, you can manually chmod your sound devices, just to make sure it works. As root, type the following in a shell:

chmod 770 /dev/snd -R && chgrp audio /dev/snd -R

It maybe necessary to add mpd to a specific group to have access to the sound card. Check your distribution but for many this group is actually the audio' group.
You can check this with the following command:

groups mpd

To add mpd to the audio group, type the following in a shell as root:

usermod --groups --append audio mpd

Possible error messages:

• problems opening audio device while playing "directory/filename.mp3"ALSA lib conf.c:3824:(parse_args) Unknown parameter 1 (yes, in one line)
• ALSA lib conf.c:3946:(snd_config_expand) Parse arguments error: No such file or directory
• ALSA lib control.c:817:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL hw:0,0
• ALSA lib conf.c:3824:(parse_args) Unknown parameter 1
• ERROR: problems opening audio device