[pulseaudio-discuss] cannot control input devices from pavucontrol + crashes in recording tab

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Peter Hercek at 28/12/10 14:27 did gyre and gimble:
> On 12/28/2010 02:47 PM, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>> 'Twas brillig, and Peter Hercek at 28/12/10 12:25 did gyre and gimble:
>>>
>>> I looked at this better today and found out that the reason the loopback
>>> sound stops is that the pulseaudio servers exits. It thinks it is idle.
>>> It looks like when some sounds go over loopback (or pavumeter) it is not
>>> considered a usefull work (the message was: "core.c: We are idle,
>>> quitting..."). But when some sounds go from some other apllication (like
>>> e.g. xmms) or when pavucontrol is running then it is considered a
>>> usefull work and the server does not get idle. This looks like a bug to
>>> me. Streaming sounds over loopback is definitely usefull work for me.
>>> Should this be reported as a bug?
>>> Is there some workaround, some way to make pulseaudio server not to
>>> detect idling?
>> Hmm, this does indeed look like some kind of bug. I'll try and see if I
>> can reproduce here and work out what's wrong.
>>
>> As a work around, you can possibly try commenting out
>> "module-suspend-on-idle" from default.pa.
> 
> Commenting out module-suspend-on-idle is not helping by itself. If I
> still load module-x11-publish then the servers exits on thinking it is
> idle anyway.
> If I comment out module-suspend-on-idle and also do not load
> module-x11-publish then the server does not exit on idle when plaing
> line-in stream through loopback only.

That is very odd. Publishing properties to the root window (which is all
module-x11-publish does really) should not affect the server exiting
structure. There are other X11 modules that will - module-x11-xsmp for
example should keep the server alive for the whole duration of the X11
session... seems very odd that x11-publish has any effect here.

There is an idle timeout in daemon.conf which will come into play here.
It's set by default to 20s IIRC, but you can disable it completely (set
it to a negative number IIRC).

Like I say tho', it's a bit odd that this would be needed here... I
think it's something to look into and investigate further.

> I do not have a clue what consequences not loading module-x11-publish
> has. I see that some properties are not registered in the root window
> but I do not know whether it is good or bad and how much.

X11-publish only really matters when you are SSH'ing to other machines
to run applications remotely (via SSH's X11 forwarding capabilities) and
want to have the sound "appear" locally too. For general, day-to-day use
on a typical desktop/laptop, it's not really needed.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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