Candid’s brain

I’ve tried to play around with the PulseAudio configuration, but random things seemed to happen. Sometimes I changed the configuration, started the server and then changed it back again, and suddenly PulseAudio would behave completely different. Most of the times the current configuration was not applied immediately but later when I had already changed it to something different.

The solution to this problem is very strange: Remove the “volume-restore.table” file from the user’s home directory that PulseAudio is run on. In my case, with the daemon running as user “pulse” on Gentoo Linux, that was “/var/run/pulse”. This file is created by the server sometimes, so be sure it does not exist everytime you change the configuration and restart PulseAudio.