According to Kyle:
Apparently, Google is not my friend this time, as I can find no information about this problem, and I appear to be the only one experiencing it, and only on this machine.
Correction: I actually did find [1], and that appears to be my exact problem, but it is also unsolved. Please help. Thanks.
Hi Kyle, I think I have also been having the same problems with pulseaudio on Arch. Basically pulseaudio seems to mute and zero the master channel on my sound card (its a VirtualBox machine) whenever it starts. I asked for help on the pulseaudio mailinglist back in June [1], but nothing much came out of it. I then gave up for a bit, but have been meaning to raise a bug on it. So this weekend I did so [2,3]. [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2012-June/013710.ht... [2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31469 [3] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54673 Cheers, Frank