LinuxMusicians

I just did a completely fresh install of Mint 17.3 Cinnamon today to get a clean start. I got the basics set up - low latency kernel, user in the audio group and a lowlatency kernel. I played with Tracktion using the alsa backend, and then decided to add the kxstudio repos and install my usual plugins (the kxstudio vst metapackage). I played some more, and then decided to use jack so I installed cadence, which pulled in some more stuff. Mint then also alerted me to some updates which were mostly kxstudio versions of some pulse and alsa stuff. I started jack with cadence and messed around a bit. I rebooted later and realized I have no devices listed in the pulse mixer, and no audio control in the system tray.

aplay -l lists my soundcards:
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: Generic_1 [HD-Audio Generic], device 0: ALC271X Analog [ALC271X Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 2: R16 [R16], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

I was using Mint with Cinnamon until a couple days ago prior to this fresh install with basically the same stuff as far as I can recall. Any idea what might be causing this?

I know this seems obvious, but did you check If pulseaudio is running?

pactl list gives a response of:

Connection failure: Connection refused
pa_context_connect() failed: Connection refused

pulseaudio --start

makes things work again. I guess now I need to figure out why pulseaudio is not starting automatically anymore...

And to follow up further, in /.pulse/client.conf - autospawn was set to "no". Changing this to "autospawn = yes" has things back to normal for me. The time stamp on the file was right about the time I was installing the kxstudio apps, like cadence. I'm not sure if one of the kxstudio specific pulse packages set this configuration differently, but for whatever reason pulse stopped auto-starting. Not sure if it was a bug or an intended thing that doesn't play nice with Cinnamon. But it must be a recent change, as it was working last week with Mint 17.2 plus kxstudio and with the new Mint 17.3 install before adding kxstudio packages.

Thanks, I understand. I'm curious how I avoided this previously, though. Before my fresh install of Mint 17.3, I had switched from using qjackctl to cadence for starting jack to allow typing in an ideal buffer size (192 in my case) that I couldn't get with qjackctl. Pulse continued to start normally at bootup. I'm wondering what I might have done differently then. Or is the autospawn config setting something new? I notice that the system tray icon has changed, so there has been some other changes since I last used cadence a week ago. Either way, it works again, and it is a great piece of software.

Edit: More experimenting: I reformatted and reinstalled Mint 17.3. I more selectively installed things from the kxstudio repos, including carla-vst and cadence, and some other vst plugins (but not the whole metapackage). Now everything works as it had before in Mint 17.2. I can start and stop jack with cadence, but there has been no /.pulse folder added to my home folder, and thus no change to autospawn settings for pulse. The only other difference is this time I only tested jack with my usb interface, and not the onboard soundcard that pulse is using. Maybe that's why things were so different. But for whatever reason, my pulseaudio settings have not been altered from their default by cadence this time around.