No soundcards found with aplay

After Fedora 22 fresh install, aplay command didn’t find any sound cards. On the other hand, root user had correct output of the “aplay -l” command. The solution was to add “audio” group to the user.

So, the first output was no soundcards found of the “aplay -l” command and pavucontrol utility showed only dummy audio device. Searching on the Internet pointed to the post where such problem is described as a lack of permissions. Solution was to add existing audio group to the user. In my scenario, user name is dbunic and here is usermod command:

usermod -a -G audio dbunic

After reboot – I’m not sure if reboot is needed and probably logout/login would be good enough – aplay worked as expected:

[dbunic@kodi ~]$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC892 Analog [ALC892 Analog]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC892 Digital [ALC892 Digital]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Adding “audio” group to the dbunic user has solved the problem – nice!

Well, all this would be fine if described procedure is must for the next created user. In my case I added kodi user to the Fedora 22:

useradd kodi

… and surprise, “aplay -l” has displayed all audio devices despite kodi user doesn’t have assigned audio group.

This is kind of enigma and any comment regarding this theme is more than welcome – thanks!

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