Last week I wrote up my desktop microphone configs. Unfortunately I didn’t fully test them.
The real test was to log out and log back in again. If I’d done that I
would have learned that pulseaudio hadn’t restarted it. That was
due to my change to ~/.pulse/default.pa.
When you log into an Ubuntu desktop, a bunch of systemd user units get run. Two of them start the pulseaudio daemon:
1 2 | systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service systemctl --user status pulseaudio.socket |
Both of these were returning an error that no modules were loaded and they just quit.
After some hunting around I learned that pulseaudio will check
if ~/.pulse/default.pa exists and load it. If not it will see if
/etc/pulse/default.pa exists and load that. It will never load both.
This is vaguely annoying as most things in Unix will load the configs in
/etc first and then load from the user’s home directory. But, kids
today, etc.
Once I removed my configs - rm ~/.pulse/default.pa - it ran fine.
Alternatively I could have copied the contents of /etc/pulse/default.pa
into the beginning of ~/.pulse/default.pa and left my changes at the
end of the combined files. However seeing as how sensitive it is to
“mistakes” I decided to just delete my change in case my TONOR mic wasn’t
seen for some reason. The udev script run when I add my headphones
to the system is sufficient.