Fedora 17 Audio Disappears Randomly

[Isaac Horvath]

Hello,
I've been having an interesting problem where the audio on my Fedora 17 installation completely dies after a few hours. What I mean by this is that no audio from any application will work any more, the sound icon will disappear, System Settings > Sound is blank in all tabs, and Rhythmbox freezes. I have a Lenovo Ideapad Z580, and lspci gives me this:

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Panther Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

I should also mention than logging out and in or rebooting fixes the problem, but that's a big inconvenience if I happen to be working on anything.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance,
Isaac

[stevea]

If you try this command ...

ps -aefl | grep pulse

you should see a pulseaudio process running, something like

1 S stevea 17417 1 0 69 -11 - 117715 poll_s Oct02 ? 00:01:43 /usr/bin/pulseaudio --start --log-target=syslog

It *sounds* like that process has died.


You can verify by trying the command *AFTER* the problem occurs. If the pulseaudio process is gone, than that would confirm my suspicion.

There *should* be log messages from pulseaudio in /var/log/messages.
sudo grep pulseaudio /var/log/messages | less

-------

Not a fix, but if you want to restart the pulseaudio service you can do so with ....
start-pulseaudio-x11
or for KDE use,
/usr/bin/start-pulseaudio-kde

(use the start-pulse... command as user not root).

[Isaac Horvath]

I confirmed that pulseaudio is no longer working. In the past I had tried simply "pulseaudio" to get it running, but I'll check the logs next time it happens.

Thanks.

[marko]

I've noticed just recently that I frequently have to kill off the pulseaudio process once (the one started at boot up by systemd) and then the system will restart it and that particular pulse process will work fine for that point on.

The symptom is that you'll start Firefox and playing a movie will be silent, if you then go to pulseaudio volume control, you'll see there's no playback or output entry for Firefox (there should be one with a L and R volume slider and a volume graph). If you then kill off the pulseaudio process, the system will start a new one. That one will usually have the correct playback entry and I'll have sound.

BTW, the easiest way to kill it is from a console:

pkill pulseaudio

[nonamedotc]

I recently faced this problem - sound would die in all applications except flash. I am not sure if our problems are exactly the same. But, in my case, I found out that I was cleaning out /tmp/pulse* files and that was killing the sound server.

The symptoms sound similar(See the attached image in this post) - http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpo...51&postcount=3

Just another thought ..