pulseaudio – How to Make PulseAudio Work Again

configurationpulseaudiosound

I was having problems with sound (mono only output), so following advice from another askubuntu question I made some edits in /etc/pulse/default.pa

After rebooting I had no sound at all. So I deleted /etc/pulse/default.pa entirely and tried another reboot. I did not backup the file (stupid, I know).

How to come back to working config?

edit:

I tried:

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio
(reboot)

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
(reboot)

It's still not working. The file /etc/pulse/default.pa is missing.

Here's what pulseaudio and pacmd commands show:

$ pulseaudio 
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup without any loaded modules, refusing to work.
$ pacmd
No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon.

Best Answer

Here's my default.pa file. Try putting it in the original folder, making sure it has the right permissions.

Next time backup important files before you modify or delete them, but I guess you learned that lesson already.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Pulseaudio not detecting bluetooth headset automatically

I found a fix for this on another answer, the problem is that the pulseaudio bluetooth module is loaded before X11, changing a couple of config files do the trick: PulseAudio can not load bluetooth module 15.10/16.04/16.10

vim /etc/pulse/default.pa

Comment out (with an # at the beginning of the line) the following line:

#load-module module-bluetooth-policy
#load-module module-bluetooth-discover

Now edit the file /usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-x11 find the following lines:

   if [ x”$SESSION_MANAGER” != x ] ; then
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp “display=$DISPLAY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER” > /dev/null
   fi

and change them to this:

   if [ x"$SESSION_MANAGER" != x ] ; then
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-x11-xsmp "display=$DISPLAY session_manager=$SESSION_MANAGER" > /dev/null
   #
   # Added per StackExchange http://askubuntu.com/questions/366032/pulseaudio-not-detecting-bluetooth-headset-automatically
   #
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-bluetooth-policy
    /usr/bin/pactl load-module module-bluetooth-discover
   fi

This way the Pulse audio’s Bluetooth modules will not be downloaded at boot time but after x11 is started.

This fix goes against the current suggestion at: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Bluetooth/

Sound – Fix ‘Failed to Open Audio Output’ Error with MPD and PulseAudio

Finally, better than pulseaudio daemon mode, the best solution is there: it is about running mpd as yourself (and not mpd user) so you have no problem to use your own session pulseaudio.

A different answer , but tested and also working:
configure pulseaudio to run as "daemon mode" instead of the standard "user mode"

in a terminal, run
sudo gedit /etc/init/pulseaudio.conf
then uncomment line 20 removing # to get:
start on runlevel [2345]
save and quit gedit.
Run this 2 commands in a terminal:
sudo usermod -aG pulse,pulse-access mpd
sudo usermod -aG pulse,pulse-access your-login
In the 2nd command, replace "your-login"

Now reboot: hopefully , it will work.

Note: For info, this page lists reasons why you must avoid pulseaudio daemon mode, but i find it ok on a single user pc (especially I see no more cpu/memory usage than user mode).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Pulseaudio not detecting bluetooth headset automatically

Sound – Fix ‘Failed to Open Audio Output’ Error with MPD and PulseAudio

Related Question