USB Webcam microphone not working until re-plugged

Question

I use pulseaudio + pavucontrol

I boot in with the microphone plugged into the USB port.

I check the Input device tab in the Volume Control application (pavucontrol) I see only my GEMIX_WEBCAM_USB_AUDIO Analog Mono and it doesn't react on any sound.

Then I re-plug the USB device and it starts reacting to the sound (you know sort of blue horizontal indicator).

The problem is that it will stop reacting to the sound as soon as I reboot or run:

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio -D

Every time to make it wake up I need to physically re-plug it ....

What can be done to avoid it?

[liza@liza ~]$ pacmd list-sources | grep -e device.string -e 'name:'
 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo.monitor>
  device.string = "0"
 name: <alsa_input.usb-Aveotek_GEMIX_WEBCAM_USB_AUDIO-02.analog-mono>
  device.string = "hw:1"

I also added this device as a default in /etc/pulse/default.pa:

### Make some devices default
set-default-source alsa_input.usb-Aveotek_GEMIX_WEBCAM_USB_AUDIO-02.analog-mono

Solution

SOLUTION:

I was looking through the output of the:

pacmd list-sources

and noticed that my * index: 1 device had state: SUSPENDED ( * - indicates that the device is the default one) There is a solution for such situation described on the wiki.archlinux So I opened /etc/pulse/default.pa and commented out the line:

load-module module-suspend-on-idle

restarted pulseaudio:

pulseaudio -k

and now in the output of the:

pacmd list-sources

* index 1 device has state: IDLE (and the state changes to RUNNING - when it's used by an application for ex. guvcview) So that's the solution. As well I'd also like to mention that I previously experienced the situation when the mic of this device wouldn't record audio at all. And the solution was to choose "Analogue Stereo Output" in the Buit-In Audio section on the Configuration tab of the Volume Control app (pavucontrol). This way I got rid of the conflict - when the system didn't know what source to use - the built-in mic or the external one.