How to stop gnome from muting my music?

Question

I use ArchLinux, and I recently installed Spotify which is working fine, except for one thing:

Every time any program triggers a system sound, the player volume is automatically muted in the mixer. How can I stop this?

I have verified that this also is happening with vlc, so I'm guessing is something related to Gnome.

Could it something related to pulseaudio?

Solution

The problem lies in a PulseAudio module called module-role-cork which exists to pause music and video during phone calls. All applications are given a media-role property which can be either music video or phone. The Cork module will give any application tagged phone exclusive access to the PulseAudio server and pause anything not tagged as such.

Simply comment out the line with load-module module-role-cork from the file /etc/pulse/default.pa

Note: Credit to David Hyrule, from this blog.

Comments

[Ra'Jiska]

Thank you very much, just updated to Ubuntu 18.04 which uses Gnome and this thing was driving me crazy. Commenting the given lines and executing pulseaudio -k & pulseaudio -D to restart pulseaudio did the trick.

[TheFrack]

I'm an ArchLinux user and wow this is crazy that this issue affected me in 2018... fixed my problem, thank you very much!