Please excuse the terse nature of this request, but I am extremely frustrated. I need to use pidgin to contact Pulseaudio via IRC, so please help.

Pulseuadio no longer works on my computer due to an update. Since forums and google have been useless, I need to contact pulseaudio via irc. HOW do I do that via pidgin because no guides work. I've eight years of experience with various Linux distros, encrypted lvms, software raid10, etc. Freebsd experience: zfs/ufs geli/gstripe raid10.
However, I cannot make pidgen contact pulseaudio irc, not that I've used IRC before.

Pulseaudio homepage: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Soft...ser/Community/

Pulseaudio alleged IRC: "irc://irc.freenode.org/pulseaudio"
The above does not function: stupid error server not known
All I want is to connect and to once again have audio. I would not be using pulseaudio were it not a requirement of Skype. Lost basic audio function on Linux using Pulseaudio (never happened with ALSA) in 2015, WOW!?
Please help and please excuse the frustration (nothing personal) but I've wasted hours on this (audio, not functioning on Linux in the year 2015 CE really?). I really am a nice person. However, given the aforementioned audio debacle, my frustration is understandable (felt by others even if they are too intimidated to express it) and so I thank you in advance for your help.

Don't know about pidgin, ircii never failed on me, I recommend you try it.

Thanks for responding. How? Is it "irii" or is "irc2." Never mind, it does not exist in my distro's repositories. Can you validate the pulseaudio irc link (irc://irc.freenode.org/pulseaudio) by chance? Perhaps with your irc experience, you could provide a working mod of the hyperlink along with info as to whether or not a password is needed. Thanks again for responding.

You can use your browser: https://webchat.freenode.net/