[pulseaudio-discuss] Since pulseaudio 5 speaker output is on headphones channel, and plugging/unplugging headphones resets settings

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2015-12-27 at 22:25 +0100, Mark Caglienzi wrote:
> Hello to all on the list,
> I submitted this bug report on the Debian BTS:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=808170
> regarding pulseaudio >= 5.x and I was instructed to ask
> the same question here.
> 
> The bug report contains all the logs with pulseaudio 4.x
> (the last version that works correctly in my system) and
> pulseaudio 7.x (the version currently in Debian Testing,
> that does not work).
> 
> I tried months ago with pulseaudio 5.x and then I pinned
> apt to pulseaudio 4.x. After a dist-upgrade I tried pulseaudio
> 7.x hoping for something better, but I experienced the same
> problem.
> 
> For the description of the problem and the verbose log files
> you can click on the DBTS link for the #808170 bug.

Not all symptoms point to it, but one known source of volume resets is
that both your regular user and gdm run their own pulseaudio daemons,
and plugging in and unplugging headphones causes interference between
the two. If you kill the pulseaudio process that gdm created, do things
get better? Note that once you kill the process, gdm will respawn a new
daemon instance, but that's ok, because it won't be able to access the
mixer as long as you keep your login session active.

-- 
Tanu