[solved] Pulseaudio cannot find output device

[fangorn]

Hi,

I did an upgrade of the system lately and on the way I recognized an update to some files in /etc/pulse during an etc-update run. As I did not edit something in these files I let it update them. After next login, pulseaudio stopped working.

In the meantime I found out that pulseaudio cannot connect to sound card device at startup and uses a dummy device instead. When I use fuser /dev/snd/* or lsof /dev/snd/* I see nothing is using the sound devices. At least not after the XFCE Desktop is started. But it worked till that update tp pulseaudio-0.9.19. I already tried upgrading to pulseaudio-0.9.21-r50 with no changes. Also with both versions I tried starting pulseaudio newly after making sure nothing is using the sound devices.

All the documentation I found ends at this point. Is there something I can try/read into that I have missed?

I hope someone can help me with this,

fangorn

Edit:
I also tried changing back to pure alsa, but did not hear anything.
I removed ~/.asoundrc and replaced it with a standard config (pure and dmix) and killed pulseaudio startup. I also reconfigured the playing apps to explicitely use the alsa output. Any hints on how to cleanly go back?

[dweigert]

I'm in the same boat, with an Audigy2 sound card. One thing I *Did* do was remove hal.

Dan

[fangorn]

In the meantime I gave up on pulseaudio, went back to my good old FVWM config, switched to alsa-driver-1.0.22.1 to get vlc from git working with alsa again and now I have audio again.

[boerKrelis]

Does something along the lines of

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --log-level=debug --log-target=stderr

tell you anything?
Of course you'd need to kill any process holding the audiodev (another pulseaudio instance, for instance) first.
Another thing that might help is to remove /var/lib/pulse/* (not while pulseaudio is running, of course).

[fangorn]

I started pulseaudio on the command line with

Code: Select all

pulseaudio -vvvv

and the only relevant message was that no device was found and dummy device was used.

[VoidMage]

What were you using: hal or udev module ?
Consider putting that output in a pastebin.

[fangorn]

I compiled in both, so according to the docs, pulse uses udev IIRC.

[boerKrelis]

Try

Code: Select all

pulseaudio --daemonize=0 --log-level=debug --log-meta=1 --log-target=stderr

Errors are shown in red. If all else fails, you could force pulseaudio to try and grab your sound card by putting something like

Code: Select all

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0

into default.pa .
And really, after pulseaudio upgrades you should remove any database files left in /var/lib/pulse/ and ~/.pulse/ .

[VoidMage]

And really, after pulseaudio upgrades you should remove any database files left in /var/lib/pulse/ and ~/.pulse/ .

Never found the need for that, except when lately gdbm was upgraded in an inconvenient way.
(there's a bug about that)

[boerKrelis]

Ah, so that was the cause of my own mysterious pulseaudio problem. Thanks for clearing that up VoidMage.
So let me rephrase that:
If you upgraded gdbm you may need to force pulseaudio to recreate its databases (by weeding through /var/lib/pulse and/or ~/.pulse/) .

[fangorn]

Try

Code: Select all

load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0

into default.pa .

That seems to have helped. A device is detected again. I did not have the time to test functionality yet though. Will report back when I have tested it.

[fangorn]

Ok, it works again. Thanks.