Solution to Problematic Audio because of Pulseaudio

Solution to Problematic Audio because of Pulseaudio


Symptoms of Problematic Pulseaudio due to permission problem:

- Some or all audio doesn't work, youtube and other flash videos affected, may not play or may play but without audio whether embedded in a website or not

- Cannot restart pulseaudio with:

$ pulseaudio -D
/or
$ pulseaudio --start

as regular or super user, however pulseaudio should work and preferably on normal user, but the user
must be in the audio group

- Pulseaudio command output:

E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.

or

E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
E: [pulseaudio] main.c: pa_pid_file_create() failed

or something similar but fails to start the pulseaudio daemon


Solution:

Delete the .config/pulse/ directory
Restart or reboot system
Pulseaudio will now start as regular user

at terminal:

$ cd ~
$ cd .config
$ rm -rf pulse/

Restart computer, everything should work.
A new pulse directory would have been automatically created in .config/ directory


Troubleshooting:

- If you prefer to not use pulseaudio you can just uninstall pulse and reinstall alsa to be sure
- If you prefer to use pulseaudio, you can also try to reinstall pulseaudio and alsa
- If those options above don't work, you can also try deleting asound.conf do: # rm -rf /etc/asound.conf
- Check alsamixer, to make sure the problem is not because of a setting that is just muted or misconfigured
   in terminal do: $ alsamixer
   anything labeled MM means its muted, toggle to enable/disable by highlighting them then press M
   press escape to exit, if the settings do not stay persistent, re-do the settings and then after exiting, in
   terminal do: # alsactl store
- If alsamixer is always mute on reboot despite doing the "# alsactl store" command, then just
  disable the module "module-device-restore" by editing the file /etc/pulse/default.pa, save, exit and reboot.



*Notes:

- Make sure your user is in audio group
- Tested working on Arch Linux