Have To Keep Pavucontrol Open In Order For Sound To Work
 

Hey Everyone!

So....I installed a new PCI sound card to fix a hardware problem. It played perfectly after install. Then it stopped! I opened up pavucontrol to check adjustments- with pavucontrol open, the sound played perfectly. When I close pavu, the sound stops after a few seconds. Open...plays perfectly. What is going on and how do I fix it?

My OS is Crunchbang (essentially a minimal Debian) on a 3Ghz P4 PC with 2GB RAM.

I also have Debian dual-booted. Can't get sound at all when booted into Debian- but I suspect that is because Debian may not support a driver for this card, but Crunchbang does (and my card is recognized, and listed properly in pavucontrol and alsamixer on Crunchbang)

Guys? Anyone??

Could this have something to do with my problems- aplay -l shows the same card listed 3 times.....WTH?

So I actually had these exact symptoms using a USB DAC on SolydX, a Debian based distro. It turned out my solution was to comment out "load-module module-suspend-on-idle" in /etc/pulse/default.pa, the default pulseaudio config file for my system.

I had serious troubles finding a solution online, though I kept stumbling onto this thread, so I wanted to give a potential solution to anyone else in a similar boat.

I ended up running pulseaudio in verbose mode while opening and closing pavucontrol with an mp3 file playing in vlc to debug this issue. I noticed messages like this:

"I: [pulseaudio] module-suspend-on-idle.c: Source alsa_input.usb-FiiO_DigiHug_USB_Audio-01-Audio.iec958-stereo idle for too long, suspending ..."

I had already tried all sorts of different settings in pavucontrol to no avail, and noted that my DAC only worked if using a profile that had both input and output (Analog Stereo Duplex for example). With this knowledge, I figured that my DAC needed it's input stream active to give me sound. That combined with the fact that it was reading as idle and getting killed off by pulseaudio, led me to my eventual solution.

It's worth noting that I did not have this issue on my desktop PC using the same DAC and OS. I believe this is likely due to pulseaudio enabling different modules by default based on system hardware differences, but have no clue. It's also worth noting that I disabled my onboard sound by using pavucontrol to set it's profile to "Off". This step may also be necessary for some people, though defaulting the DAC in output devices tab may also have the same effect.

Hope this helps someone :) Sorry for any post formatting faux pas, this would be my first here.

Here's a quick fix that I found looking around for my S/PDIF that kept disconnecting when I closed pavucontrol. I'm betting this would work in this case too.

From : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio

To disable loading of the module-suspend-on-idle module, comment out the following line in the configuration file in use (~/.config/pulse/default.pa or /etc/pulse/default.pa):

### Automatically suspend sinks/sources that become idle for too long
# load-module module-suspend-on-idle

Finally restart PulseAudio to apply the changes.

Holy frijole! Dr_Evil and DCKemble! IT WORKED!!!!

Funny thing, I THOUGHT that I had already tried this, based on some Google searches- but I figgered[sic] I'd double check. Turns out, for some reason, when I had tried doing it in the past, instead of saving it to the "default.pa" file, it had somehow created another file.

So I fixed that, and appended the real file...and VIOLA[sic]!

I was really worried, when none of the gurus could seem to help....

Woo-hoo!

Thanks so much, guys!!!!

Glad I could help :D

Have fun with your sound system ;)