Monday, July 18, 2011

Spotify vs. pulseaudio: workaround

I use to run Spotify on linux under wine. It's quite esasy to install, and it works great, and almost out of the box. At least sometimes. I've been running spotify over wine on several installations and sometimes it works just fine, sometimes not, I still don't know what's the difference (didn't have the time to investigate any further). And even sometimes it stops working suddenly, again, who knows why exactly.
Anyway, it doesn't seem to integrate fine with pulseudio. I mean wine, not spotify itself. So the workaround I am using is to start Spotify killing the pulseaudio server (I'm always running it on a per user instance, not daemonized by root).
So the startup command is something like:

Exec=pulseaudio --kill; env WINEPREFIX="" wine "C:\\Program files\\Spotify\\spotify.exe"


Check out the desktop icon that wine creates when you make a regular install; edit the file and change/add the pulseaudio --kill sentence.

As I said, sometimes nevertheless Spotify stops working. I have no workaround for that yet, just have to restart Spotify again. It can be a little annoying. I'm pretty sure there's already a definite solution for that out there (please, somebody tell me if you know ;)).

1 comment:

Rimas Kurtinaitis said...

If I use this, does pulseaudio restart when I close spotify or would it require me to restart it manually?