How to temporarily disable PulseAudio?

Question

Just wondering if there a way to temporarily disable PulseAudio as I am trying to run a specific Wine game (Left 4 Dead 2) and it makes the game crash occasionally.

If I kill the process it automatically comes back up. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use pasuspender. Try prefixing your wine command with it.

pasuspender -- wine path/to/file.exe

Answer 2

In my case, I was unable to stop pulseaudio since it was being restarted automatically by systemctl.

The proper way to stop pulseaudio, in that case is:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service

To start it again, you can use:

systemctl --user start pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service

Answer 3

I use the script:

#!/bin/bash
echo autospawn = no > $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf
pulseaudio --kill
rm $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf

Then play the game, then re-enable PA:

pulseaudio --start

Works on Xubuntu 13.10. Replace ".config/pulse" with ".pulse" in the script if it doesn't work (usually on old *buntues)

Answer 4

What I did.... stopped it from respawning because it couldn't find it....... right click the /etc folder in the file browser (open as root) create a new folder called pulseoff, then move the pulse folder into it (drag and drop). The system doesn't have the command to look there for it. If you want to start it again, cut it from the pulseoff folder, go up a step to the /etc folder and paste it there...... Some people like to make it out to be harder than it really is with editing files and stuff and mostly those edits don't work I tried them. Do it the easy way. I restarted the machine and checked the system monitor before posting this, pulseaudio is not running and sucking up memory.

Answer 5

Try this Ubuntu Tips. It works fine on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Ubuntu Tip: Turning PulseAudio On and Off

Answer 6

Alt+F2 type pactl exit

stops all pulseaudio processes. You can enter

Alt+F2 type pulseaudio

to start it again. Unfortunately, some programs doesn't seem to sound anymore, after that. Still looking for a way to reactivate pulse without reboot…

Answer 7

In /etc/pulse/client.conf, you can uncomment the line autospawn=yes and replace the yes with a "no". Of course this should be possible to set this in .pulse directory in your home directory.

A cleaner way to do this would be to create a client.conf in your .pulse dir in ~ and put the line "autospawn=no" in it. It would be good to turn back on autospawn after you have done what you need to do.