xfce4-volumed/mixer packages have incompatible pulseaudio recommends

Hi there, and thanks for your report,

Does the problem also happen if you disable xfce4-volumed (Applications->Settings->Session&Startup or something like that)?

I'm quite sure it doesn't come from my daemon. It will only act on one channel (Master, if none is set, as in your case), and it will not mute your volume unless you press the mute key.

Sorry, I should have mentioned in my original report ...

I disabled xfce4-volumed by changing OnlyShowIn to NotShowIn in ~/.config/autostart/xfce4-volumed.desktop. This resulted in xfce4-volumed not being started when I log in. In this case, both the Master channel and the PCM channel are correctly set to the previous values after login (usually PCM 100% and Master 81%).

I then started xfce4-volumed from the command line, and the volumes for both PCM and Master dropped to 0% and the Master channel was marked [off] (i.e. muted).

This leads me to believe that it really is coming from xfce4-volumed. It must be an indirect effect of daemon startup somehow.

This appears to be caused by some common element of xfce4-volumed and xfce4-mixer. In the same scenario as comment #3, I start xfce4-mixer from the command line instead of xfce4-volumed and the same behavior occurs: Master and PCM are both muted.

I don't have any more information at this time. I just wanted to register that the problem is not specific to xfce4-volumed. I will investigate further when I have the opportunity.

I found a related upstream bug for xfce4-mixer: http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5091

Thanks for your investigation, Brandon. The Xfce mixer and the Xfce volume
daemon have some common code (i took the code from the mixer to keep
consistant track/card names between both apps), so that may help to find the
culprit code.

Could you please confirm that you have pulseaudio installed and running when
this happens? You can check if pulseaudio is around with the following
command:

"ps aux | grep pulseaudio". It should return at least one line not ending
with "grep pulseaudio" if pulseaudio is running. If PulseAudio is running,
could you please uninstal it (sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio), relog,
check if the volume daemon still mutes your sound, and of course then
reinstall it, if you think it is useful to you.

Thanks in advance for these extra informations.

You were right on the mark Steve. I removed pulseaudio and the problem disappears.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.

Thanks for your confirmation. There are no plans to make XVD compatible with PulseAudio right now since the XFCE mixer will probably include it directly in a future version that will be PulseAudio compatible. By the meanwhile, I apologize for the inconvenience.

Oops ... I hadn't looked quite carefully enough in order to figure out that gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio is one of multiple items that satisfy an xfce4-mixer dependency. It most likely would not have been installed if I had not had to install from the lpia alternate install image. This means that I had to install ubuntu-desktop, then install xubuntu-desktop, and then remove ubuntu-desktop. pulseaudio was installed as part of ubuntu-desktop and then simply not removed later.

It seems like it would make sense for xfce4-volumed and xfce4-mixer to list pulseaudio as a conflict, since the combination causes trouble. However, this could cause trouble for users installing both ubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop.

I will change the states of the two bugs to invalid. If you think it would be reasonable to mark pulseaudio as a conflict for these two packages, please change the state back. It's not a big concern for me now that I see what the problem is, but it could confuse others.

Hi

Check #352732, it may help. Maybe we are talking about the same, #77 of that one solved the problem.
 I could unmute everything on the alsa mixer, no sound was the result, pulse audio mixer was muted.

Antonio