PulseAudio died badly and now it doesn't seem to work

[Jeff Brown]

I'm running Kubuntu 17.10 with a lot of kxstudio stuff installed, in particuolar Cadence, using the Alsa -> PulseAudio -> Jack bridge. I had a lot of audio apps (including maybe five Spotify tabs in Chrome) open at once and my computer froze severely, so I hardware-rebooted.

If I try to play audio in Chrome, after starting pulseaudio, cadence, both or neither, I hear nothing, although the play position indicator moves as if it was working. However, I can use SuperCollider -- I guess because it goes straight to Jack without using PulseAudio?

Cadence starts on boot, but does not start the server automatically. When I force-restart Cadence, I get some errors. I've attached the Jack logs from starting Cadence under two conditions: when pulseaudio has not been started from the command line, and when it has been. (When I ask Cadence to start the server, Cadence starts PulseAudio if PulseAudio is not already running.)

When I reboot, before starting the server from Cadence, I can start PulseAudio, maybe? Running "pupulseaudio --check" after that gives me no output:

Code: Select all

jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ pulseaudio -D       # daemonize it
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ pulseaudio --start
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ pulseaudio --check
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$

but I still think PulseAudio is running, because I can kill it, once, if and only if I have previously started it:

Code: Select all

jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio: no process found
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ pulseaudio -D
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ pulseaudio --start
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ killall pulseaudio
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$ killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio: no process found
jeff@jeff-inspiron-2017:~$

Even before starting PulseAudio or the server in Cadence, I can start SCIDE (the IDE for SuperCollider), and boot from within it, which appears to start jackdbus. I can then use SuperCollider. From the konsole I can kill jackdbus as many times as I like and it seems to keep respawning, even after killing SuperCollider.

Someone here
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159605
said that I could delete .config/pulse and restart and it should work. I renamed it instead of deleting it. It didn't help.

[sysrqer]

Have you checked if anything is muted in alsamixer? It's odd that pulseaudio doesn't report any issues when it starts - that was when Jack and jackdbus was not running? I suspect that pulseaudio is working ok but Jack is running in some form and blocking the sound. You could reset cadence but I'm not sure that would help.

It's there a reason you are demonizing pulseaudio?

[Jeff Brown]

Nothing is muted in AlsaMixer; I even checked all the playback devices on the two sound devices (loopback and default) that aren't in use.

I was demonizing pulseaudio because that's what they said here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159605
Since you questioned that, I've been trying it both ways.

> It's odd that pulseaudio doesn't report any issues when it starts -
> that was when Jack and jackdbus was not running?

I think so. To be sure, I just tested again: I rebooted, found Cadence and jackdbus running, but pulseaudio off. I started the server in Cadence, found pulseaudio still off. Next I force-started the server, found pulseaudio on. Next I stopped the server in Cadence, quit Jack (from the icon in the KDE toolbar), killed jackdbus and pulseaudio from the command line. (Had to use "killall -9" to kill jackdbus.) Next I start pulseaudio, not daemonized, with "pulseaudio --start". No complaints -- at least, none printed onto the screen. Then I killed it and started it again daemonized.

After each step I tried audio in Chrome, and couldn't hear anything. Usually it looked like it was working (scrolling across the track), but sometimes Soundcloud wouldn't even let me click on the play button for a track.

[Jeff Brown]

The problem was Chrome, not any of those other things. I had been answering "yes" when it asked whether I wanted to restore the old windows each time I restarted it. This time I closed them all and said no, and now it works.

Thanks for your help!

[sysrqer]

That's good news, glad you managed to solve it.