Notes about using Pulseaudio
I feel like I always encounter annoying issues when trying to use Pulseaudio. I'll try to leave a collection of tips and tricks here.
Something that people I talk to are often not aware of is that Pulseaudio is using Alsa. So if a soundcard doesn't work with Alsa it won't with Pulseaudio either.
Missing audio sink/source
Pulseaudio seems to often fail to notice the appearance of a new Alsa device.
In this case I add the device manually by the finding its ids with aplay -l
and arecord -l
and then I add the audio source with pactl load-module
module-alsa-source device=hw:2,0
and the audio sink with pactl load-module
module-alsa-sink device=hw:2,0
(this example uses card 2, device 0).
Stopping Pulseaudio
Pulseaudio is restarted whenever it is killed which is more often than not a
pain. If you want to test or use your soundcard without Pulseaudio you can use
pasuspender
to have it release the soundcards. If it's still not sufficient
for you, your only options left are either to temporarily make it
non-executable or simply move its binary away.