Pulseaudio not starting

Question

Well here's an embarrassing problem. PulseAudio doesn't seem to be working. I've been trying to load the sound applet for a week or so and I checked ps aux | grep pulse and found that there's no PA daemon running!

Sound is still working. I assume everything has fallen back to ALSA.

Furthermore I've tried to start PA from the command line. pulseaudio -D just errors out with nothing useful, just E: main.c: Daemon startup failed.

pulseaudio on its own raises a little more:

$ pulseaudio
E: main.c: Unknown command: !/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF
E: main.c: Failed to initialise daemon.

I can start it as root with --system but nothing can connect to it. That's not the right way to run PA, so I'd rather fix it than bodge around it.

Answer 1

Well that was the weirdest thing. I opened up /etc/pulse/default.pa and noticed that the first line was:

!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF

That looks an awful lot like a #!/bin/bash style opening (I don't know the proper name for it, comments on a postcard) so I stuck a hash at the beginning like so:

#!/usr/bin/pulseaudio -nF

And it works!

No idea how that got broken. I don't think I've ever purposefully edited that file before.