[pulseaudio-discuss] No shutdown/startup sounds in gnome

[Colin Guthrie]

JaM wrote:
> I have pulse audio installed on a gentoo linux system and have it
> running as a separate instance for each user.  For whatever reason,
> however, I do not get any startup/shutdown sounds.  I do get the rest of
> the system sounds but nothing for the startup and shutdown.  Is there
> something I can do to diagnose what is going on?  If I look in the Sound
> Settings Panel I can play the shutdown/startup sounds fine.  Any help
> would be appreciated.

I saw you on IRC last night but you disappeared before I could comment ;)

How large are your sounds? If they are > 1Meg they wont be cached by
pulse-audio and thus wont be played.

Verify this by seeing if the samples in question are cached in paman. If
they are not there but sounds for other events are, then this is likely
your problem.

If no sounds are there at all then I think gnome is falling back to
playing uncached sounds and that during your startup, you do not start
pulse quickly enough to play the sounds (pulse takes longer to startup
than esd did and thus the timeouts in gnome-session may not work as well).

In Mandriva we start pulse at login via /etc/X11/xinit.d early on so
when gnome-session gets round to looking for "esd", pulse is already
started and things work.

I think the large samples is more likely tho'. If so, cut the size of
the file down by reducing the sample rate or up the cache limit in pulse
by hacking it a little (one line change). I'd go for the former as
having a large sound kicking around in the cache that is used only once
is rather pointless ;)

HTHs