Pulseaudio can't find hardware anymore

[Andy Owen]

Binary package hint: pulseaudio

I'm not sure what has changed, since this worked correctly a few days ago, and I don't remember doing anything to change it. But, the devices list in pulse audio is now empty (missing both a usb device, and an internal soundcard).

My syslog has a whole lot of messages like this in it:

Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3484]: main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock
Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3486]: core-util.c: Failed to create secure directory: Permission denied
Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3486]: lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3486]: main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock
Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3488]: core-util.c: Failed to create secure directory: Permission denied
Nov 20 23:52:37 marvin pulseaudio[3488]: lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
Nov 20 23:55:52 marvin pulseaudio[3656]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting.

I tried restarting it:

$ sudo /etc/init.d pulseaudio restart
 * PulseAudio configured for per-user sessions

But that didn't help.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

This is most likely due to ~/.pulse* having incorrect permissions. See the output from:

ls -l ~/.pulse*

Note that the files and directory need to be owned by your user. If any aren't, remove them, logout and login again.

[Andy Owen (the-new-andy)]

Unfortunately, I started up the computer today and everything was back to normal.

I checked the permissions anyway, and they are all correct. I don't see how they could have changed either (either to being broken or being fixed).

But if it happens again, at least I'll know where to start looking. Thanks for your help.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Thanks. Please reopen if reproducible.

[David Robert Lewis (afrodeity)]

pulseaudio[2029]: core-util.c: Home directory /etc/timidity not ours.
Nov 7 11:06:04 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2029]: lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
Nov 7 11:06:04 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2029]: main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock
Nov 7 11:06:04 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2111]: core-util.c: Home directory /etc/timidity not ours.
Nov 7 11:06:04 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2111]: lock-autospawn.c: Cannot access autospawn lock.
Nov 7 11:06:04 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2111]: main.c: Failed to acquire autospawn lock
Nov 7 11:06:26 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2665]: alsa-util.c: snd_pcm_avail_delay() returned strange values: delay 0 is less than avail 128.
Nov 7 11:06:26 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[2665]: alsa-util.c: Most likely this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue to the ALSA developers.

[David Robert Lewis (afrodeity)]

pulseaudio appears to work, but it fills up my syslog with these:

 ratelimit.c: 16 events suppressed
Nov 8 17:49:29 afrodeity-desktop pulseaudio[6484]: last message repeated 4 times

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

@David Please open a separate bug. Your bug is different from the original reporter's.