Pulseaudio crashing in Ubuntu 13.04
 

I don't know whether to ask this here or start a new thread.

I got Ubuntu 13.04 installed. After that, the first time I tried watching a movie on VLC, I got sound through my Bluetooth headset, but then it cut out entirely. I found a window underneath the VLC screen saying that Pulseaudio had stopped inexplicably. I clicked to have it restart, and restarted VLC too, just in case.

There continued to be no sound.

I went to Sound Settings, and found that, while the headphones were still recognized and paired, "Connection" was set to "Off." I wasn't able to switch it to "On." I tried turning the headset off and then on again, but that made no difference.

I can't remember what I did that finally made the connection turn on, but I found some way to do that. Once I did, though, there was still no sound through the headphones.

In sound settings, on the headset tab, there were two options for the kind of sound. I can't remember now what they were, and now Sound Settings will not show settings for the headphones, only for a new arrival called "Dummy Output," which doesn't show two options for sound. Anyway, when I chose the option for headset sound that was not chosen by default, sound reappeared – but several seconds late, with cutouts, though I was sitting right in front of the computer.

The headphones have plenty of battery power.

Can anyone help?

Thanks.
___

Update:

I got the PulseAudio error report again. It says, "The application PulseAudio Sound System KDE Routing Policy has closed unexpectedly." So it begins to look like this could all be a PulseAudio problem. I don't see any documentation at PulseAudio's site about this sort of trouble. VLC's site says, "Try using another audio output plugin and, under Unix, kill esd, artsd or pulseaudio if they are running." I don't know how to kill processes, nor how to tell whether they are running, but I suppose, based on that, next time I get the PulseAudio error, I should select not to restart it – except that that would leave me, it seems, with no sound.

Trying again, I can see headset settings. One of the sound options is "High Fidelity Playback (A2DP)"; the other is "Telephony Duplex (HSP/HFP)". It's been defaulted to the latter, with no sound; switching to the High Fidelity has what has gotten me any sound at all.

There is no sound at the moment, though all the sound settings and switches seem to be right. I clicked on the Applications tab in Sound Settings, and find "No application is currently playing or recording audio," though VLC is running video. I think this was the situation both times I got the PulseAudio error, but I'm not getting that error now.

I'm very sorry that this is so long. I understand that it's irritating to have to wade through lots of words. I just don't know which information is relevant, and I don't know how to sort it to make it any easier to process.

I have the same problem.

Kmix only shows the dummy audio. I'm not sure what caused it to happen though. I was trying to compile and install linrad. It crashed when I started it and after that discovered I had no sound.

Edit.

I should add that when it was working kmix only showed one output, ext speaker not the internal speaker, headpphones as it shows in PCLinuxOS. It also did not show different inputs as in PCLinuxOS.
e.g Line, mic, aux etc.

I forgot to come back here to post that the problem disappeared within a day or two of my last post. As usual, I don't know why. Until a couple of days ago, when I somehow became unable to watch movies at all (sigh), audio was working fine, even with Bluetooth headphones.

I ended up reinstalling as there was no way I could get the sound to work.

Every thing was directed to the dummy sound! I haven't yet tried reinstalling the ham radio stuff.

Thanks, kwill. I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one with this sort of trouble.