[pulseaudio-discuss] Sources only working when pavucontrol is running

[David Henningsson]

Brendon Costa wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> Thanks for the info on the default devices. I have it working fine now.
> 
> However I have run into another problem. When I run my application,
> the sinks are working fine and audio sounds good. However the sources
> are not working correctly. If i run my app, i get occasional bursts of
> sound from whatever source I am using instead of a continuous stream
> of audio. If while my app is running i then start the pavucontrol
> application, everything seems to magically start working perfectly.
> Somehow starting the pavucontrol application fixes whatever problem my
> application is experiencing.
> 
> Does anyone know what the pavucontrol application does that might be
> affect my application? 

Pavucontrol opens all sources and sinks to provide peak meters.

> Does anyone know if it changes the priority of
> the server or change buffer sizes etc?
> 
> Any suggestions on what i can do to track this problem down?

Perhaps you could try making a log for both scenarios and compare them,
and see if there is anything unusual? Here's how to do it on Ubuntu, I
assume it's very similar on most other modern distros:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio/Log

// David