[pulseaudio-discuss] State not restored in system mode

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sat, 2016-10-15 at 16:40 +0200, Florian Lindner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> this is a follow up to my previous thread.
> 
> I'm using pulseaudio in system mode. It basically works fine, besides
> that the state is not restored. So I need to login and unmute the device
> after each boot.
> 
> The device is an Asus Xonar PCIe card.
> 
> Currently, for debugging I start pulseaudio manually after boot using
> the service file
> 
> [Service]
> Type=notify
> ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --system --realtime
> --disallow-module-loading --disallow-exit --log-target=journal
> --log-level=debug
> 
> I also changed the home directory of the pulse user from /var/run/pulse
> to /var/lib/pulse, to check if there are issues with an home that is
> cleared on each boot (what happens to /var/run/ afaik)
> 
> The distribution is Arch, pulseaudio is on 9.0.
> 
> Restore modules are loaded:
> 
> # grep load-module /etc/pulse/system.pa
> load-module module-udev-detect
> load-module module-detect
> load-module module-esound-protocol-unix
> load-module module-native-protocol-unix
> load-module module-default-device-restore
> load-module module-stream-restore
> load-module module-device-restore
> load-module module-card-restore
> load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-anonymous=true
> load-module module-zeroconf-publish
> load-module module-rescue-streams
> load-module module-always-sink
> load-module module-suspend-on-idle
> load-module module-position-event-sounds
> 
> The log output is attached or at http://pastebin.com/AxJBCqAz

The log doesn't show any changes in the sink mute state. The log shows
some mute toggling of tunnel streams, however:

Okt 15 16:25:52 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 2 changed from no to yes.
Okt 15 16:25:52 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 2 changed from yes to no.
Okt 15 16:25:53 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 1 changed from no to yes.
Okt 15 16:25:53 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 1 changed from yes to no.
Okt 15 16:25:55 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 3 changed from no to yes.
Okt 15 16:25:55 marduk pulseaudio[855]: The mute of sink input 3 changed from yes to no.

It seems that sink input 1 is a tunnel stream for the internal sound
card, and sink inputs 2 and 3 are both tunnel streams for the Xonar
card. Do you have two tunnel sinks loaded for the Xonar card?

The mute events don't really match your description of the problem,
though, because the initial mute state seems to be unmuted, and these
events just quickly toggle unmuted -> muted -> unmuted, so there's only
a very short time (less than a second according to the time stamps)
when the stream is muted.

What if you don't connect from outside at all? If you ssh into the
server after booting, do you get audio if you run

    paplay --device=alsa_output.pci-0000_03_04.0.analog-stereo /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

> After I unmute the device, a restart pulseaudio.service does not mute it
> again. It only happens at a system reboot.
> 
> Is there a way to use pacmd or alike to connect to the system daemon and
> unmute the device? Currently I login and use pavucontrol.

"pactl set-sink-mute", see "man pactl" for details.

-- 
Tanu