This is a seriously obscure menu option that you should almost never take -and I've agonised over whether to include it in the program at all. It may well disappear in a future release! It also is (hopefully obviously) irrelevant to any PC not actually using Pulse as its audio server technology (such as a machine from Apple running macOS).

The reason for its existence is simply that when I was developing Giocoso Version 3, I was using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my main music playback device. My Topping E30 USB DAC was plugged into the Pi, and everything played just fine… until it would mysteriously stop working! This would fairly consistently happen if I ever paused playback for quite a while: resuming playback from the point previously reached would result in mere silence. I found by trial and error that if I restarted the Pi's PulseAudio server before attempting a resume, I could resume with audio sounding as normal. So, to make restarting the PulseAudio server as convenient as possible, I added in Administration menu Option 8.

I later switched to running my music via an ancient HP 'thin client' PC, however: despite that machine's age and feeble CPU, it nevertheless manages to pause and resume music perfectly and I've accordingly never needed to reset the PulseAudio server on it.

Now, it's known that the Pi 4 has fairly flakey USB 3 support, and I accordingly suspect that pausing the Giocoso music playing process for a long time on that specific device somehow caused the Topping E30 DAC to lose its connection with the Pi. Restarting the PulseAudio server made the Pi re-discover the DAC device and thus music playback could work once more. For any non-Pi device with non-flakey USB support, therefore, I strongly suspect that this menu option will never be required and accordingly should never be taken… but I've left it available, just in case, for any Pi 4 users out there.

I hear good things about the Raspberry Pi 5's much more robust and standard support for USB 3 standards, so I'm hoping that Pi 5 and later users won't have the need to restart PulseAudio periodically anyway. I do not have a Pi 5 to test that on, however, so it remains conjecture on my part.

Anyway, this option is not just for users of flakey hardware and Raspberry Pi 4s: any PC can sometimes get a bit confused and if your audio suddenly stops working, this option might help to fix it.

As the menu text itself mentions, resetting the PulseAudio Server requires issuing commands with root privileges, so you'll be prompted to supply your own password to acquire sudo rights. If audio still doesn't work after you've tried this option, it's time to start listing your audio devices (with aplay -l and ensuring that your required output hasn't acquired a new hardware identifier, which can happen). If that doesn't provide any clues, it's possibly time to check your audio hardware and/or wiring!

Note that if you're running Giocoso on a system that doesn't use PulseAudio at all (think of macOS, for example), this option might produce assorted error messages before deciding to do precisely nothing. It's only effective on machines running Linux that do use PulseAudio as their sound architecture. Any errors you see displayed are of no consequence, however, and won't be detrimental.

| Back to Software Home | Back to Giocoso Documentation Home | Back to Administration Menu |