The simplest pulseaudio installation on Arch

2019-08-20

I've previously ended up very confused by pulseaudio. Previously I've had over-complicated setups using a global daemon when really the standard Arch packages are very well thought out, and don't require much setup at all.

For a basic pulesaudio installation from a clean installation, this is all you need:

$ yay -S pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa ncpamixer
$ systemctl enable --user pulseaudio.socket
$ systemctl start --user pulseaudio.socket
$ ncpamixer # Ensure your audio device isn't muted or anything silly

That's it. This works well for a simple setup with a single USB soundcard, and the defaults are sensible and automatically detected.