I've messed up pulse audio -- Mostly RESOLVED

Fred Krogh · Last edited by Fred Krogh on Wed Mar 08, 2017 3:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

I'm logged in as user1 using xfce4. I have a terminal open for user2. Sound WAS working for user1, but not for user2. Somewhere along the line in trying to get sound to work for user2 I've messed things up so sound works for neither. I think I used to use analog stereo in pauvcontrol. That is no longer listed as possible. Trying to run alsamixer gives

Fred Krogh · Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 3:34 pm Post subject:

Mostly fixed by a reinstall of pulseaudio.

lyallp · Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 3:32 pm Post subject:

Are all users a member of group 'audio'?
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Fred Krogh · Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 3:42 pm Post subject:

Yes, that was checked early on. There are two problems still, but they are minor. When rebooting pusleaudio does not start, and so I need to start it in a terminal window. And I'd like sound to work in mail-notification. Every once in awhile it does, but I fail to see a pattern. In addition to users, sometime ago I added pulse and mail to the audio group, in an effort to cover all bases. Thanks for the thought.

Leio · Developer Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 494 Location: Estonia

Theoretically there is no need to start pulseaudio on startup, it should be spawned automatically when some client needs it, and then stick around until killed or some timeout configuration.
Albeit pulseaudio (at least with some USE flags) does ship /etc/xdg/autostart/pulseaudio.desktop too, that is set to autostart in GNOME and KDE via exec'ing start-pulseaudio-x11, but it works fine without that for me (as I am on Wayland and that Exec doesn't work all too well there, so it autostarts itself when needed).
There could be a problem when some pure alsa-lib using thing is occupying the sound card at the time pulseaudio would want to start from a native pulseaudio using call, but that would be solved by alsa-plugins[pulseaudio] which makes it route those to pulseaudio instead, and thus even then autostarting pulseaudio instead (this is IUSE defaulted to be enabled/installed out of the box unless you did something to avoid that).

There is a configuration option to not do that autostart behavior, maybe that's enabled on your system or for your user (e.g autospawn=no in ~/.config/pulse/client,conf ~/.pulse/client.conf or /etc/pulse/client.conf)?
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