[pulseaudio-discuss] Help Need with loss of sound problem

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Sun, 2017-10-01 at 14:26 +0200, mycomp at tutanota.com wrote:
> Can anyone please help with a problem concerning the 
> loss of sound in a Debian Jessie system.
> 
> Due to sound problems whereby sound was first okay, 
> then lost,  then regained, then lost again when running vlc 
> on a sound file and also when running YouTube, the following was 
> done :-
> 
> Pulseaudio was installed on Friday and 
> 
> % dpkg -l | grep pulseaudio
> 
> gave 
> 
> ii pulseaudio 5.0-13 amd64 PulseAudio sound server
> ii pulseaudio-module-x11 5.0-13 amd64 X11 module for PulseAudio sound server
> ii pulseaudio-utils 5.0-13 amd64 Command line tools for the PulseAudio sound server
> 
> % aplay -l
> 
> gave 
> 
> **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
> card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog]
> Subdevices: 0/1
> Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital [ALC887-VD Digital]
> Subdevices: 1/1
> Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
> Subdevices: 1/1
> Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
> Subdevices: 1/1
> Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
> 
> Jessie was then re-booted and the sound then re-appeared.
> 
> Also
> 
> % ls /etc/pulse 
> 
> gave 
> 
> client.conf daemon.conf default.pa system.pa
> 
> and
> 
> % ls ~/.pulse 
> 
> gave 
> 
> 259df95a2b75426bb6ef25f372b08be2-card-database.tdb
> 259df95a2b75426bb6ef25f372b08be2-device-volumes.tdb
> 259df95a2b75426bb6ef25f372b08be2-runtime@
> 259df95a2b75426bb6ef25f372b08be2-stream-volumes.tdb
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-card-database.tdb
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-default-sink
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-default-source
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-device-volumes.tdb
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-runtime@
> 3e0b1f6422592f67f9f012034c3323d0-stream-volumes.tdb
> 
> Vlc was used to run a test sound file (soundfile.wav) and that ran okay.
> 
> Sound also worked fine on YouTube.
> 
> However, the sound was then lost when trying to use vlc again on a
> sound file and also was not present when trying to use sound with a
> Web browser.
> 
> % vlc soundfile.wav
> 
> gave 
> 
> VLC media player 2.2.6 Umbrella (revision 2.2.6-0-g1aae78981c)
> [0000000000971608] pulse audio output error: PulseAudio server connection failure: Connection refused

"Connection refused" usually means that PulseAudio isn't running.
Debian Jessie should have autospawning enabled by default, so if it's
not running when VLC tries to use it, it should start automatically.
Have you possibly disabled autospawning in /etc/pulse/client.conf or
~/.config/pulse/client.conf?

If autospawning is enabled, apparently it's not working. What does this
command print?

    PULSE_LOG=99 pactl info

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk