Arch Linux

Kironide

Member

Registered: 2014-11-26

Posts: 3

PulseAudio takes a while to detect headphones

Hi,

I'm having a difficult-to-describe issue in which, whenever I boot up the system, PulseAudio isn't aware of my headphones and so doesn't let me select it as an output option (which I'm viewing with pavucontrol). This is true regardless of whether or not the headphones are plugged in when I boot up Arch. Sometimes it seems to resolve itself automatically, i.e. without any action on my part PulseAudio works fine some time after boot (anywhere from 1 minute or more); sometimes it seems to recognize the existence of my headphones if I play a bunch of different audio streams (that don't result in any sound output from my headphones, just to the default test output device); sometimes if I restart PulseAudio a bunch of times and play audio, it seems to spontaneously recognize my headphones.

This is true on multiple Arch installations, going as far back as December of 2014 and being true on a fresh installation as of right now. My version of PulseAudio is almost always completely up-to-date.

I didn't have this problem when I used just ALSA and not PulseAudio.

Any information on what might be causing this?

Malkymder

Member

Registered: 2015-05-13

Posts: 258

Re: PulseAudio takes a while to detect headphones

You could debug using the following in a terminal (this is presuming you don't have a client.conf already)

unplug headphones then do

echo autospawn = no > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio --kill
pulseaudio -vvvv

plugin heaphones and look at the output to see if any obvious errors show up

then when done 

rm $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseadio --start