pulseaudio sink always suspended

Question

I am on Debian Pulseaudio 2.0-6.1. Up to now never had any issues with sound.

I made some experiments with remote sinks and now it seems pulse it totally messed up.

I have only one sink. When I restart pulseaudio pactl shows the sink as IDLE. As soon as an application tries to output sound the state changes to SUSPENDED and stays that way. "pactl suspend-sink 0 0" does not change the state. I can only get it to IDLE by restarting pulse and the cycle starts again.

After a reboot the problem persists.

Sam Brightman · Answer 1 · 2021-11-14T09:58:50.377

26

Have you tried disabling suspend-on-idle in /etc/pulse/default.pa? I change this:

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

to this:

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

and then to restart it. There is quite a lot of variation in how people do this but killall pulseaudio has always worked for me (it gets automatically started again).

edited Nov 14 '21 at 09:58

answered Dec 07 '14 at 09:30

Sam Brightman

382

It helps me to startup Asus Xonar Essense One. – Pavel Patrin Apr 22 '16 at 13:30
This solution also solved my problem when vlc was reporting "connection refused" errors. – Edward Z. Yang Aug 28 '16 at 00:40
1

Is there a way to limit this to specific sinks, like the HDMI one? I only have issues with my AVR not recognizing when the audio starts again after a longer pause. – DanMan Jan 18 '20 at 22:07
Thank you! In case anyone wants to automate this in an installation script: sudo sed 's/load-module module-suspend-on-idle/#load-module module-suspend-on-idle/' /etc/pulse/default.pa -i – sezanzeb Apr 12 '22 at 17:16
1

Maybe anchor the regex to start of line to make it idempotent? – Sam Brightman Apr 12 '22 at 17:17
Awesome. This solved the problem I have where my monitor hisses at me all the time I'm not using sound. – Majenko Jun 17 '22 at 09:57
Why isn't the default value working? – aurelia Oct 12 '22 at 17:49
On my system (Manjaro) there was another config where I had to remove the load-module line: ~/.config/pulse/default.pa – Birkenstab Mar 09 '23 at 09:08
I also had to restart the program playing audio after killing pulseaudio to get it to work. – NuclearPeon Oct 10 '23 at 18:28

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 12 '22 at 20:39

1

SOLUTION: When I installed pipewire-pulse, and it replaced pulseaudio, all the issues resolved.

WHY: In my case, pulseaudio was not working because I had both pulseaudio, pipewire and wireplumber installed and working.

I only installed pulseaudio manually. However, I also installed GSConnect, and after a system update it must have installed pipewire and wireplumber as its dependency.

answered Oct 12 '22 at 20:39

aurelia

121

pipewire-pulse also fixed Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended. on boot after recent (2022-09) update of ArchLinux. – temoto Nov 17 '22 at 20:40
did you have to reboot or something else? Doing what sam-brightman suggested helped me while pipewire-pulse didn't. – dr0i Nov 28 '23 at 08:27

pulseaudio sink always suspended

2 Answers2