Hi! I have noticed already since last few versions of Debian (now i am using Buster) that the pulseaudio server tends to mess up audio sinks. For example i have installed pulseaudio as systemd service on my Raspberry Pi 4 serving nicely my Bluetooth headphone to all my clients. That seems to work using avahi and zeroconf modules of pulseaudio to advertise my audio devices on my Raspberry Pi 4. On my desktop machine i run pulseaudio on a per-session basis as daemon. In both cases, when i use the pavucontrol mixer afte some time, sound applications are not showing up anymore and now even Youtube playback was left muted, without possibility to adjust volume. It happens both on Raspberry Pi 4 desktop as well as on PC desktop. Rastarting pulseaudio does not help. Restarting the computer itself is an unviable option.

Considering that pavucontrol would be a nice feature taking advanteg of pulseaudios capabilities of streaming sound in the network to different sinks, it seems unplausible that that bug has not yet been corrected. Furthermor pulseaudio is the pre-installed sound server on most distros.

How can this problem of loosing sinks and inputs in pavucontrol be overcome. I think that something is wrong in pavucontrols data structures to list and manage sinks and inputs.

The Arch wiki article on pavucontrol discusses sinks. Maybe it will help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...uration_method

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Thanks for your hint. I looked into my installed packages. It seems like JACK is really interferring with pulseaudio as described in the ArchWiki. Then if PulseAudio is not buggy, then i could simply uninstall Jack and use pulseaudio?

Jack is a very specialized application needed primarily if you are doing recording and must pipe audio from one application to another (hence the name "jack," as in "audio jack").

If you don't have a positive need for Jack, there is no reason to keep it installed.

I know that a lot persons don't like pulse (some because they felt as if it was foisted on them, others because they are not fans of its original developer), but I have had no issues with it.

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I don't know how Jackd got installed on my system, but it seems that it comes pre-installed since maybe at least Debian Jessie. Somehow i consider this to be counterproductive, but who knows who is trying on the reputation of average user Desktop Linux here...

Jack is not a problem you need to learn to sync them.
There are four scripts to handle this. But remember jack is never ran till invoked. it is a sound server like Pulseaudio. Pulseaudio is ran when when system gui starts.
Jackd runs when you ask it to run.
Delete the dot --> .config/pavucontrol.ini
and the .config/pulse folder.
now reboot
Make sure jack isn't started at startup. If you want to use jack with pulse Simple screen recorder program made these
and This hub keeps a copy. read them understand.
if you use these scripts when done you must remomve the ~/.asoundrc
Here is the correct example of the .asoundrc
Jack in use you use the .asoundrc not in use you remove it.
Jack is a very powerful tool.

The programs that must be rebuilt if using jackd are pulseaudio and alsa-plugins. if not you may want to use the ubuntu studio build.
This is the main reason why linux musicians stray away from default builds of Linux. Pulseaudio may not build the jackd modules if jackd is not installed.
lets hope your flavor of ubuntu what ever debian based distro used the with-jack when compiling.

Hi! Thanks for the info. I also stumbled about such kind of arguments of the .asoundrc-type. First of all, there is also a potential group of average desktop Linux users, who would be simply happy, if they had out-of-the-box sound functionality without flaw. A working pulseaudio could do wonders here. For everyone who wants to do the special things for which only Jack can be used, maybe they should simply deinstall pulseaudio??? Being capable yourself of rebuilding packages is more a matter of being a developed Linux user/guru/programmer than being a musician who wants to use Jack or a simple guy who wants to have a working sound server with some basic (working) functionality. Insofar it would maybe be a good idea to not install jack autpomatically. Also i did not find any hints in the documentation of pulseaudio about its strange interactions with Jack, whereby i suppose it is not pulseaudio's fault, if jackd hijacks pulseaudios's traffic. Maybe it would need a kernel level functionality to manage such strange conditions with the sound-servers nicely. Also, one could simply integrate the missing functionality of jack into pulseaudio or the other way round and make the more powerful the default sound server. One process hijacking traffic from another is for sure no clean solution for a standard environment.