[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio stops to work suddenly

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Thu, 2012-10-18 at 14:46 +0200, Antonio Trande wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> Since I start to use kernels 3.6* in Fedora 17, pulseaudio has a strange
> behavior.  After system boot everything seems work fine,  suddenly
> pulseaudio daemon crashs, for example if I try to play a flash video
> streaming (with gnash plugin). System audio is not audible, all volumes are
> unchanged.
> 
> My first attempts are:
> 
>   $ rm -rf .pulse
>   $ pulseaudio --kill
>   $ pulseaudio -D -vvvv
> E: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup failed.
> 
> Does anyone encounter this type of problem ?
> 
> I attach alsa-info and pulseaudio logs for more informations.

In the pulseaudio log, this is the relevant error:

E: [pulseaudio] socket-server.c: bind(): Address already in use
E: [pulseaudio] module.c: Failed to load module "module-esound-protocol-unix" (argument: ""): initialization failed.

Some old esound socket is left lingering, and pulseaudio isn't smart
enough to handle that gracefully. The socket file is
at /tmp/.esd-UID/socket - remove that and things should work again. You
can also remove the line in /etc/pulse/default.pa that loads
module-esound-protocol. That will ensure that you won't have this same
problem again. Not loading the module should be pretty safe, since
almost no application depends on esound these days.

-- 
Tanu