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Well, I've been a user of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS since April now, and it's been a very pleasant experience. I'm a big fan of electronic music, and I tend to have my tracks playing in the background while I do things on my laptop, either in YouTube or in Clementine, my default music player. All has worked very well until now.

A couple of days ago my entire PC started to lag really badly. Almost everything was unusable. I opened up System Monitor via the terminal to find a process called "pulseaudio" using nearly 1GB of RAM and over 80% of my CPU. I needed to get some important work done and so I killed the process without thinking.

Once again today, pulseaudio decided to lag the hell out of my PC, and so I killed it again. Nothing seemed to happen immediately, but once I opened up YouTube all the audio on videos stuttered a lot, while the videos played smoothly. I restarted Firefox to find that the audio was now not working at all, with both headphones and speakers, and the volume up quite a bit (it's not muted, I've checked that!).

A little bit of research later and I've discovered that pulseaudio plays an important part in Ubuntu's audio. Even after restarting my PC the audio still ceases to work in any applications or with any output. The pulseaudio process refuses to start up again.

So, can you help me out here? What can I do to fix my problem, and why was pulseaudio doing this in the first place?

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The problem may be associated with pulseaudio settings of your user profile. You can try this quick solution. Open a terminal and run rm -r ~/.pulse ~/.pulse-cookie. Then log out and log in.

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  • Hey Anwar. I'm very new to Ubuntu's terminal, doesn't rm -r delete the whole contents of the root directory? I'm sorry, don't know if there was a spelling mistake or if I'm just stupid. =/
    – Laika
    Jul 6, 2012 at 19:18
  • rm -r is recursive removal. It just removes all the contents of a directory and the directory. It won't remove root.
    – Shelby. S
    Jul 6, 2012 at 20:02
  • @Laika Just make sure you don't accidentally put a space after ~ or / (that would remove your whole home directory, including any documents you keep there). One good way to avoid this risk is to instead run cd ~ followed by rm -r .pulse .pulse-cookie. I recommend giving instructions that don't cause major data loss or other problems from a one-character mistake, when possible. (But rm -r ~/... commands are quite commonly passed around...with occasional disastrous data loss by inexperienced users.)
    – Eliah Kagan
    Jul 6, 2012 at 20:26
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    Don't use rm -r - use mv ~/.pulse ~/.pulse.bak instead - its safer ;)
    – Takkat
    Jul 6, 2012 at 20:34
  • Or, if you don't want to use the terminal, open the file browser Nautilus to let it show hidden files (Ctrl+H) and rename the .pulse directory to .pulse.bak.
    – Takkat
    Jul 6, 2012 at 20:36

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