SMPlayer Support Forum

This is not an issue, just a question. Pulseaudio is automatically started when my system starts. If I start SMPlayer and open Preferences a second Pulseaudio is started so that there are now 2 instances of Pulseaudio running. No other app that uses Pulseaudio does this. I was just wondering why this happens with SMPlayer?

This happens on Linux Mint 17.2 with the latest version of SMPlayer, mpv, and Pulseaudio 4.x
It happened on Debian (tracking testing) with the latest version of SMPlayer, mpv, and Pulseaudio 6.x
It happens on Debian (tracking testing) with the latest version of SMPlayer, mpv, and Pulseaudio 7.x

From what I can remember this also happened with older versions of SMPlayer.

When the preferences dialog is opened, it runs the command "aplay -l" to get a list of the available audio devices. Maybe that application runs another instance of Pulseaudio.

If I run "aplay -l" from a terminal it doesn't start another instance of Pulseaudio. It's no big deal. I was just curious.