How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Hi!

I've got a couple of sound issues which I suspect might be linked to
Pulseaudio.

I'd like to temporarily disable Pulseaudio and see if I experience those
issues with ALSA alone.

It seems that Pulseaudio is part of the %desktop-services.
However it's not listed in

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
sudo herd status
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

for me.  Any idea why?

Killing the pulseaudio process manually results in it being
automatically started.  I suspect that's expected from shepherd.

Any clue how to kill it for real?

Cheers!

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Julien Lepiller]

Le 19 avril 2020 10:30:52 GMT-04:00, Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> a écrit :
>Hi!
>
>I've got a couple of sound issues which I suspect might be linked to
>Pulseaudio.
>
>I'd like to temporarily disable Pulseaudio and see if I experience
>those
>issues with ALSA alone.
>
>It seems that Pulseaudio is part of the %desktop-services.
>However it's not listed in
>
>--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>sudo herd status
>--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
>for me.  Any idea why?
>
>Killing the pulseaudio process manually results in it being
>automatically started.  I suspect that's expected from shepherd.
>
>Any clue how to kill it for real?
>
>Cheers!

Actually pulseaudio is not started by the shepherd, it's started by your user processes. Basically, when they try to use it and it's not present, it is automatically started so they can talk to it. Killing it won't help, because it will be restarted by the first app that tries to play sound.

You could make it crash at startup, but then you will get no sound at all. That's what happens with the home manager if you don't implement a workaround. Make your home read-only and you can get rid of pa… and all audio with it :/

The pa service is only to set a default configuration in /etc, but it's always overwritten by configuration in your home (that's why a read-only home crashes it). There's no process started or managed by it.

Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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In my case the daemon gets restarted directly, no need to start an audio program.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 06:18:57PM +0200, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> In my case the daemon gets restarted directly, no need to start an audio program.

You'll have to look closely at your running programs. It's likely that
one of them is starting it. Probably your desktop manager if you can't
think of anything else.

Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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> You'll have to look closely at your running programs. It's likely that
> one of them is starting it. Probably your desktop manager if you can't
> think of anything else.

I run EXWM and the rest is pretty bare-bone.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Marius Bakke]

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Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Hi!
>
> I've got a couple of sound issues which I suspect might be linked to
> Pulseaudio.
>
> I'd like to temporarily disable Pulseaudio and see if I experience those
> issues with ALSA alone.
>
> It seems that Pulseaudio is part of the %desktop-services.
> However it's not listed in
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> sudo herd status
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> for me.  Any idea why?
>
> Killing the pulseaudio process manually results in it being
> automatically started.  I suspect that's expected from shepherd.
>
> Any clue how to kill it for real?

Pulseaudio is designed to be started on demand by any application
attempting to use it, so it cannot really be disabled AFAIK...

You could try to build the application you want to test without
Pulseaudio support, and run it after killing the pulseaudio daemon.

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> writes:

> You could try to build the application you want to test without
> Pulseaudio support, and run it after killing the pulseaudio daemon.

But how do you kill the pulseaudio daemon?  It gets restarted instantly.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Pierre Neidhardt <mail@ambrevar.xyz> writes:

> Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> writes:
>
>> You could try to build the application you want to test without
>> Pulseaudio support, and run it after killing the pulseaudio daemon.
>
> But how do you kill the pulseaudio daemon?  It gets restarted instantly.

The documentation suggests to disable autospawn and to then kill the
daemon process:

  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Running/

-- 
Ricardo

Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Thanks for the tip!

I created ~/.config/pulse/client.conf with

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
autospawn = no
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

in it.  Then I ran

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
pulseaudio -k
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

But pulseaudio keeps restarting.

I've got no programs other than EXWM running in the background.

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Leo Famulari]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 04:30:52PM +0200, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I've got a couple of sound issues which I suspect might be linked to
> Pulseaudio.

You can run a program with `pasuspender -- FOO` to temporarily suspend
the PulseAudio server. That might help...

Re: How to temporarily disable Pulseaudio?

[Pierre Neidhardt]

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Thanks for the trick, didn't know about pasuspender! :)

It seems to work with audacity, however the "default" is mute.
Audacity lets me choose the audio device, but programs that do not will
use "default" and have no sound.

Any idea around this?

-- 
Pierre Neidhardt
https://ambrevar.xyz/

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