- How to Fix pulseaudio issues in Linux
- Restarting the pulseaudio Service Without Logging Out
- Best 4 Ways to Restart PulseAudio
- How to Restart PulseAudio
- Run as Daemon
- Using service command
- Using restart command
- Killing the service and then restarting it
- Stop the services of PulseAudio:
- Remove the plugins for the software:
- Restart the PulseAudio by executing the below line:
- What is “restart PulseAudio”
- What is PulseAudio
- Which audio driver does PulseAudio use?
- Restart PulseAudio in ubuntu
- Restart pulseaudio failed. what are the alternatives?
- How to reset the PulseAudio configuration settings?
How to Fix pulseaudio issues in Linux
Ocassionally the pulseaudio service stops for various reasons. Most commonly it suddenly stops working after playing certain sorts of full-screen games or playing certain videos. If one of these applications were to suddenly stop or if you had to use xkill to force it to stop, then you might need to restart the pulseaudio service. You don’t have to completely reboot your Linux PC or tablet to achieve this.
The most common way is to log your desktop environment out and then log back in again, but this is annoying and it doesn’t always work. It also requires you to close many programs you already have running inside of this environment. A couple of terminal commands are all that you’ll need to restart the audi daemon and hear clear sound once again. You might still have to restart an application or two if they don’t respond to the restart, however.
Restarting the pulseaudio Service Without Logging Out
Open a terminal window by holding down CTRL, ALT and T or select it from the application or Dash menu appropriate for the type of graphical user interface you’re using. You won’t need administrator access for most of these commands, so make sure that you have a $ prompt if you’re using the bash shell. Users of tcsh might want to type in whoami to make sure they’re not going to start the pulseaudio service as root.
Check if any instance is currently running by typing pulseaudio –check and pushing return. You’ll usually see no output at all. You may also see a zero, which is the same as receiving no output. This indicates that there’s no instance running. If you got any message about an instance presently running, then you could issue the command pulseaudio -k to kill the existing one. Once you’ve done this, or if you had no previous instance running anyway, you can type pulseaudio -D to start a new instance, and the process will launch automatically before it returns you to the command line.
You don’t even need the terminal if you know for sure you don’t have an instance running. You could hold down the Super or Windows key and push R to open up the run box and then type pulseaudio -D into it. Push the enter key or click the button to issue the command.
Technically you could even use this box to kill an existing pulseaudio instance with pulseaudio -k, which is useful if you have no other reason to bring up a terminal. Some people actually write a short bash script to automate this process, but these commands are so short that it’s hardly necessary to do so.
Start your video, your MMORPG or your FPS again and enjoy now that you have full sound coverage once again. Any user-defined setting in ~/.pulse or ~/.config/pulse will override the system-wide settings, so you may wish to look into these configuration files if you constantly have problems.
If you never hear sound when you’re running a program, then you might need to start it with padsp in front of it to make sure that it can jack into the pulseaudio process. You might also want to start alsamixer in your terminal to make sure the audio level settings are correct. If the padsp fix helps you launch it from the Super+R command line or the terminal, then you’ll want to modify the .desktop file that starts the program. You could also put padsp nameOfGame into a bash or tcsh script. Replace nameOfGame with the actual command name of the program that you’re trying to run.
When all else fails, you can actually start the pulseaudio service on a system-wide level with the sudo service pulseaudio restart command. Since this begins with sudo, the CLI prompt will ask you to enter your password if you haven’t issued any commands using sudo recently. Since this does activate the service on a wide scale, you shouldn’t use it as a first resort. You can actually use top or busybox top in your terminal to see what pulseaudio usually runs as. If you don’t see it at all, then you know that it’s not starting properly to begin with.
Use the Page Up and Page Down keys to scroll through the top listings, looking at each bracketed service to see if pulseaudio starts with the system. Usually the pulseaudio -k command tells you if it is anyway, but this is an excellent way to be sure. If nothing else seems to be working and you’re using Xubuntu or another Xfce4-based distribution, then there’s an error you might have fallen prey to that doesn’t influence LXDE, KDE or Unity users. When you go to shut down the machine, a check box asks to save your session.
This is especially true if you use Alt+F4 from an empty Xubuntu desktop to shut the system down. This could constantly save an incorrect pulseaudio setting, at least in theory anyway. You could try un-checking it and restarting the system. While this does require a restart, which you were more than likely attempting to avoid in the first place, it might prevent future problems. Once you have it working well, you can select that checkbox again to save the other schemes you have in place. You won’t have to restart again in the future, and can simply use the pulseaudio -D command if this did indeed fix the problem you were having.
A very few users, especially those running Linux on ASUS eeePC mobile devices, say that after restarting pulseaudio they suddenly hear a crackling noise. This is an unusual driver problem, but you can fix the issue with relative ease. Try plugging any USB device into a USB port and then restart the puleaudio daemon. You might also try plugging and unplugging something into the headphone jack. Apparently, this inadvertently sends a signal that the open-source driver interprets and corrects the issue. This isn’t a problem for those running pulseaudio with proprietary drivers installed.
Best 4 Ways to Restart PulseAudio
You are working or editing your audio file, and suddenly it got stuck in the middle, and you are unable to restart PulseAudio ? Don’t worry! We will tell you every possible way to fix this nuisance.
How to Restart PulseAudio
When your PulseAudio gets stuck or keeps refreshing itself, which makes it inconvenient to use the software, then you can try the below suggested ways to fix your issue by restarting PulseAudio:
Run as Daemon
Firstly you will have to halt the PulseAudio. Check if the PulseAudio is running using the below commands in Terminal and as a user, not as a root.
pulseaudio --check
If this software is running, it will display “0” as output, enter the below line and execute it. Or else move to the third code to start it as a Daemon.
pulseaudio -k
To start this as a Daemon thread, type:
pulseaudio -D
If still the restart PulseAudio didn’t work. You can try the other ways listed below.
Using service command
In the Terminal, with standard user features, use the below code and execute it.
sudo service pulseaudio restart
Using restart command
The below command can restart the PulseAudio in the terminal pane:
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio
Killing the service and then restarting it
Stop the services of PulseAudio:
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
Remove the plugins for the software:
rm -rf .config/pulse
Restart the PulseAudio by executing the below line:
pulseaudio --start
What is “restart PulseAudio”
The PulseAudio is a new software that can crack itself sometimes. To rectify this issue, you will have to restart PulseAudio by moving into the Terminal window as a user and executing the lines mentioned above.
If these didn’t work, try a system restore to a point where the issue was not found. If this also didn’t help, the only option left is to do a factory reset if you choose to work with PulseAudio only. As there are many alternatives to this application, there won’t be a need to perform the factory reset.
What is PulseAudio
In simple words, it is an mp3 file editing and transferring software. In this software, you can adjust the volume, move a file to another machine, alter the channel count, mix more than one audio file into one, and much more.
Even though this is not the recommended nor the preferred software to do this stuff, it is still better than most other applications. It is applicable for Linux, Unix, and those types of Operating Systems.
Which audio driver does PulseAudio use?
The audio driver which the PulseAudio and Jack Audio uses is ALSA . The diver ALSA is challenging to use and is not user-friendly. To lessen the headache of using ALSA for editing the audio files, JACK Audio and PulseAudio come in handy and helpful, as they’re simple to use and make use of ALSA Driver.
Restart PulseAudio in ubuntu
Kill any instance of PulseAudio if it is running with: pulseaudio -k
Restart the PulseAudio software again as a Daemon: pulseaudio -D
Restart pulseaudio failed. what are the alternatives?
Kill the service using the command in Terminal: systemctl –user stop pulseaudio.socket
For disabling the service, in place of the “socket”, type service.
Remove off the plugins: rm -rf .config/pulse
Start PulseAudio again: pulseaudio –start
How to reset the PulseAudio configuration settings?
Use the below command to change the wrong PulseAudio settings:
mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.config/pulse.old
if this did not help, try:
mv ~/.config/pulse ~/.pulse.old