Ubuntu – 16.04 with Unity – Icon with sound indicator icon is gone. How to activate it

PulseAudio is an audio system that, among other things, enables multiple applications to use the audio interface at the same time. It can also be used for things like sharing audio over the network. So, PulseAudio is a good thing.

1. If PulseAudio keeps crashing, then something is wrong. The best way for you to prevent that from happening, is to file a bug on http://Launchpad.net and get the developers attention. We don't exactly have a configuration option to enable or disable application crashes. :)

2. Yes, restarting the indicators might be a successful workaround. In order to do that, you'll press AltF2 and type killall unity-panel-service

If restarting PulseAudio and then restarting the panel service works, then you might want to combine them in a script so you can do both things at once. You can then create a new text file in Gedit, paste the following and make the file executable. You do that by right clicking on the file, selecting properties > permissions > Allow execution of file. Afterwards, you can run that script as a normal program.

This is the script itself:

#!/bin/sh
pulseaudio --start
killall unity-panel-service

So, if you call the file fix_audio.sh and place it in your home directory, you'll be able to run it by pressing alt+f2 and typing ~/fix_audio.sh.

However, even if this workaround works, you should still file a bug on Launchpad so that the problem itself gets fixed for you and everyone else.

For Spotify version 0.8.8 and earlier

The best way to do this is to remove the icon used by spotify to display the indicator. This can be done by executing the following command in the terminal,

sudo mv /usr/share/spotify/theme/other/_linux/icon.ico /home/user_name/icon.ico

Replace user_name with your user name. This should effectively disable the spotify indicator. Exit spotify and restart spotify to notice the change.

For versions higher than 0.8.8

open up a terminal and open the zip file as root:

gksu file-roller /opt/spotify/spotify-client/Data/resources.zip

Then, inside the zip file, navigate to the _linux subfolder and delete the .ico files inside it. That's it.