For the last month or so, Pulseaudio has been crashing for me. It seems to
happen only when I use certain apps, such as watching video with VLC,or
watching embedded videos in Firefox. It does not happen when listening to audio
through an audio player, or having Zoom calls. After a crash,the Pulseaudio
Volume Control will give a "connecting to Pulseaudio" error. Restarting with
either "pulseaudio --start" or "pulseaudio -k" will hang for10-20 seconds, and
then "work", in that "ps" will show Pulse is running, but I still can't play
music (through anything), and the volume app shows thesame error. This will
last a few minutes, until sound starts again.
This was on Bullseye; I recently upgraded to Bookworm (for other reasons,
though I hoped it would help with this), and it's still happening, althoughnow
"pulseaudio --start" will respond almost instantly. However, it still takes a
few minutes for sound to come back.
Where do I look for help on this? /var/log/messages shows warnings about a
deprecated module, but nothing more serious than that. I'm not sure wherethese
crashes might be recorded, or what else to do. But having sound is very
important to me, so I'd love to fix this!
