Comment 10 for bug 663019

I've been bitten by this, too, and it cost me four hours to find the root cause - my own user specific config.

It's entirely my fault, because typing 'man pulseaudio', then scroll to the bottom, then type 'man default.pa' would have alerted me early of this problem. Instead I searched the internet high and low which one should always stop if there are hundreds of different by similar issues discussed for different versions of the sound stack.

However, maybe I'm not the only one, and maybe we have to help users a bit.

My proposal would be to

1. add mention to this fact (user's default.pa replacing the system wide one) in the man page of pulse-cli-syntax right in the first paragraph of the DESCRIPTION, and
2. if no modules are loaded, and debug level of printing is selected, specifically output a message along the lines of 'If no modules are loaded, check if a user specific config replaces the system wide default'. Potentially name the config files.

Cheers for an otherwise great sound system :)