Arch Linux

lqdev

Member

Registered: 2020-12-20

Posts: 2

Problems with my JACK+PulseAudio config

I just switched over from my already falling apart Artix install over to Arch, but I'm having some trouble getting my JACK+PulseAudio config to run.

I installed the jack2, pulseaudio, and pulseaudio-jack packages, but my startup script for JACK and PulseAudio didn't seem to work right away. Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/fish
jack_control start
pulseaudio -D

I noticed however that PulseAudio applications don't seem to work. pavucontrol shows "Establishing connection to PulseAudio. Please wait..." indefinitely. Removing the pulseaudio command from the script did seem to make a difference, but now PulseAudio seems to be taking precedence over JACK, which is not what I want. I can do pulseaudio -k and then pulseaudio -D again, and now it properly starts up bridged to JACK. But trying to do the same from this startup script doesn't yield any effects.

After some digging around I noticed that there's a systemd unit pulseaudio.service, which seems to be trying to start up PulseAudio automatically but fails every time. Is there any way I can disable this service? Running systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.service didn't have any effect, the service still runs at startup.

Here's the output of systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service, if relevant:

~ 21:48:20
❯ systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service
● pulseaudio.service - Sound Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2020-12-20 21:37:02 CET; 11min ago
TriggeredBy: ● pulseaudio.socket
    Process: 1593 ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no --log-target=journal (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
   Main PID: 1593 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Dec 20 21:37:01 daknus systemd[530]: pulseaudio.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 20 21:37:01 daknus systemd[530]: Failed to start Sound Service.
Dec 20 21:37:02 daknus systemd[530]: pulseaudio.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Dec 20 21:37:02 daknus systemd[530]: Stopped Sound Service.
Dec 20 21:37:02 daknus systemd[530]: pulseaudio.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Dec 20 21:37:02 daknus systemd[530]: pulseaudio.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 20 21:37:02 daknus systemd[530]: Failed to start Sound Service.

After seeing the output of this and reading up about sockets, I was wondering whether there is anyway of disabling that socket. I tried systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.socket but it doesn't seem to have any effect, PulseAudio still seems to be starting up via systemd.

lqdev

Member

Registered: 2020-12-20

Posts: 2

Re: Problems with my JACK+PulseAudio config

Alright, found it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Running

systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.socket

did the trick.