[Pkg-pulseaudio-devel] Bug#525572: pulseaudio: volume muted after every boot

[Terry Watt]

Try this:
1. Close all programs that could be using sound (Iceweasel, players, etc.)
2. Set the volume as you want it.
3. rm -r ~/.pulse/
4. reboot

See if your sound settings are carried through.  That proved to be the 
solution for several of my systems.  I don't know what precisely went 
wrong.  It wasn't as simple as installing pulseaudio, but rather started 
when some other update went through when pulseaudio was installed.  It 
is possible the "other update" was gnome-media (2.22 -> 2.24), as the 
timing was right; rebooting or not between the updates made no 
difference, but I ran out of computers needing updates before I could 
pin it down to the exact package, and didn't have the time to invest to 
downgrade and re-upgrade progressively.

I should also point out that I only ever had the mute problem on reboot, 
not just logging out and back in.  On the other hand, if I rebooted but 
then logged into a failsafe terminal rather than my normal gnome 
session, the sound settings would be fine (checking via alsamixer) until 
I closed the terminal and proceeded to normal login (at which point my 
master or front, depending on the system, would be set to 0%/mute).  I 
tried all kinds of fixes related to alsa that had absolutely no effect.  
This also solved a problem where I would usually get sound from 
programs, but the test pipes in Preferences -> Sound would fail when 
"autodetect" was selected for any given setting.

I think this is just a configuration issue/conflict between pulseaudio 
and some gnome component, but can't give any more information at this 
point or have any idea if it will occur again.