PulseAudio is the default sound server used in Ubuntu these days (including many other GNU/Linux distributions). Although I usually end up having troubles with it thus I just use ALSA instead. But many like it for its versatile features.
Anyhow, as a quick tip, if you ever encounter troubles with PulseAudio and wanted to restart the PA Daemon in Ubuntu or any distribution that uses PA, you can simply open your Terminal and enter the below command, and it should solve some of those issues (hopefully).
pulseaudio -k
After issuing the command in Ubuntu you should see the audio icon changes into something similar as shown above. Just wait for few seconds and after the restarting process is completed you should see the default PulseAudio icon in your notification area again as shown below.
That’s it.
3 Comments
Many thanks for how to restart the PA Daemon in Ubuntu or any distribution that uses PA,
You’re welcome Ragbir.
Thanks so much for this!
I just migrated all my business computers over to Linux and all of them have had different audio issues. Alsamixer fixed most of them (Linux seems to want to overdrive audio and it can cause persistent hum), but one machine has an issue where Pulse will lose access to the audio hardware and defaults to a dummy driver when it comes back from suspend mode. Restarting pulse fixes it so I just added a command to the Main menu to run this as a script when it happens (doesn’t always happen). Good enough fix and sure beats rebooting every time =)
I figure the issue derives from kernel 5.4 not liking this old of hardware (2006 Intel audio) as I also had to disable powersave features. Linux outputs constant clicks from the line-out with powersave on.