Bug#704305: not working reliably with USB devices

[Daniel Pocock]

Package: pulseaudio
Version: 2.0-6
Severity: important


I'm using a default installation on wheezy/gnome, set up as a laptop.

The device works fine on another system, a server with a pulseaudio
daemon process set up manually.  On the default desktop gnome setup,
however, I'm finding pulseaudio highly unreliable with a USB device,
Creative Soundblaster X-Fi HD.  Other people report similar problems.

It has worked occasionally, but usually it doesn't

Sometimes I see this error in dmesg or console:

    usb_set_interface failed

and sometimes /var/log/user.log contains messages such as

  module-alsa-card.c: Failed to find a working profile.

I've tried deleting ~/.pulse* and rebooting, doesn't help

I've also noticed that if I try to kill the pulseaudio process (e.g. to
try changing something in /etc/pulse/default.pa) it tries to start 5
more copies and logs a heap of errors to /var/log/user.log -  this seems
like some issue with the restart mechanism.  In any case, having it
restart automatically is quite annoying when troubleshooting.