Arch Linux

leniviy

Member

Registered: 2009-05-23

Posts: 177

[solved] pulseaudio systemd service mutes sound card

Hi.
I'm in a situation best described by this comment https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues … -880129348 :

PulseAudio starting or restarting resets the ALSA volume to its default value (undoing any alsactl restore, or manual alsamixer changes, or whatever)

Indeed, after manually running systemctl --user restart pulseaudio
as a regular user I get:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────
│ Card: HD-Audio Generic                  
│ Chip: Realtek ALC887-VD                 
│ View: F3:[Playback] F4: Capture  F5: All
│ Item: Front [dB gain: 0.00, 0.00]       
│       ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐     ┌──┐   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│     │▒▒│   
│       ├──┤     ├──┤     └──┘     ├──┤   
│       │OO│     │OO│              │MM│   
│       └──┘     └──┘              └──┘   
│       100    100<>100 100<>100 100<>100 
│      Master  Headphon   PCM   < Front  >
└─────────────────────────────────────────

Notice the muted "Front". How to instruct pulseadio to stop doing that?

Last edited by leniviy (2022-09-05 21:26:21)

---

Arch 64, xfce4

leniviy

Member

Registered: 2009-05-23

Posts: 177

Re: [solved] pulseaudio systemd service mutes sound card

I didn't know that Pulseaudio had the concept of "Ports" (like "Headphones" or "Line Out").

It appears that these Ports are combinations of hardware outputs like this:
"Line Out" : "Front", "Surround", "Center"
"Headphones" : "Headphone"

and Pulseaudio mutes the hardware outputs not used by the active Port.

Despite the cable was plugged in the rear panel the active port was "Headphones".

I'm not sure why the detection provided by module-switch-on-port-available wasn't working, but now it is working (toggling the Output Port manually in pavucontrol ).

Maybe I should have erased ~/.config/pulse/ beforehand.

---

Arch 64, xfce4