"FIXING PAVUCONTROL
"
Problem
I run Arch Linux on my personal machine. I love the configurability and that it
forces you to understand Linux and how things work. With Arch, things don’t “just work”,
you have to make them work. However, there are a lot of opportunities to also incorrectly
configure things, which is exactly what I did with my audio. Audio would work —
i.e., I could change volume, mute, etc. — but, I could not change I/O devices
using pavucontrol
. You don’t need pavucontrol
to control I/O, but it is a nice
UI for handling this.
I learned a lot in the process of fixing pavucontrol
on my machine.
alsa
is a kernel space tool, pulseaudio
is a user space tool for interacting with
alsa
. A lot of applications require pulseaudio
, but you can get away with lighter alternatives.
The Fix
- Update Related Dependencies
pacman -Syu pulseaudio, pulseaudio-alsa, pulseaudio-bluetooth, alsa-lib, alsa-utils, alsa-firmware
- Update (Re-sync) the PulseAudio Config
What I finally did was make sure that the PulseAudio config for the current use was in sync with root. To do this, I did the following:
sudo cp -r /etc/pulse ~/.config/
pushd ~/.config/pulse && sudo chown -R <username> .
- then in ~/.config/pulse/client.conf, made sure that
autospawn = yes
pulseaudio --start
pavucontrol
started working!
References
- Huge shoutout to this post
- This was another helpful post which first exposed me to the user vs root config files and other alternatives to pulseaudio, if I decided to go that route.