switch-on-connect mistakes startup for USB hotplug, so seemingly ignores the old default device on reboot

We configure PulseAudio by default to automatically choose hotplugged devices so it might be thinking booting with USB counts as hotplugging. To avoid this you should just be able to comment out:

  load-module module-switch-on-connect

from /etc/pulse/default.pa

Hi Daneil!

Commenting out "load-module module-switch-on-connect" in /etc/pulse/default.pa did indeed work.

OK, thanks. So it's kind of working as designed and kind of not...

If you would like to get this fixed then please open a new bug upstream:

  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues

with a title like:

  switch-on-connect mistakes startup for USB hotplug

Seems reasonable.

Created an issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pulseaudio/pulseaudio/-/issues/886

Thank you for the help.

Thanks

Isn't this the same as this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/1847570

Yes, I thought so too. I even linked it in the description. Since the issue persists after the supposed fix however, it is still an issue.

Matthew M. Dean (fireculex), for example, also still has issues (see the other ticket, second to last comment).

As mentioned by Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt), on the last comment, if there still are issues -> create a new ticket, which I did.

I guess the major difference is that in my case it is a USB-device and not an HDMI.

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1877194

This behavior particularly affects Raspberry Pis, where USB is the only bus available for a lot of devices and treating this as "hotplug" gives wrong results.

That doesn't mean the default should change for pulseaudio on the desktop in general, but should somehow be treated in a hardware-specific manner.

I would suggest making /etc/pulse/default.pa key its loading of module-switch-on-connect on the absence of a flag file, which could then be provided by raspberry pi images.

I'm going to open a task on ubuntu-settings for the moment, since it provides ubuntu-raspi-settings that seems the most likely existing package to attach the raspi side of this to.

I'm not sure we even need switch-on-connect anymore. It was introduced as a patch in 2017 (bug 1702794) at the request of Will Cooke but I suspect later upstream changes within the module logic like module-switch-on-port-available might suffice now.

Kinetic is switching to pipewire, unsure if the issue is already there with it, could someone try?

switch-on-connect is a feature of PulseAudio only so we should probably say "Won't Fix" in kinetic.

@seb128 tested with pipewire on kinetic with a Pi 4B and it correctly selects the HDMI out by default both on initial setup and after a few reboots. So, looks like this could be "invalid" on kinetic, at least for the Raspberry Pi case. Would be useful to double-check that on PC hardware too, obviously.

We don't need to check. "switch-on-connect" is a feature of PulseAudio only. Even if a similar bug was ever seen in PipeWire, it would get a seperate bug report.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Still a problem on jammy, and removing switch-on-connect does fix things there.

The result of that change is that plugging in a new (never seen before) USB device does *not* automatically switch to it, but once the device has been selected as the output, it will subsequently be automatically selected when plugged in (or at least that's my experience on my PC).

And it also clears up the "always selects headphones output" issue on the Pi. I'll target this to jammy given we're still getting duplicate reports about it (LP: #1995459 is the latest)