How can I force the (re)discovery of PulseAudio network sound devices?
- by Christian
I'm using the PulseAudio feature of network sound devices (not Multicast/RTP) to play sound from my netbook on the audio equipment connected to the HTPC when at home. This creates a virtual sound device that I can then use instead of the physical built-in one. Most of the time this works just fine. Sometimes however, the virtual sound device just doesn't appear. Disconnecting from and reconnecting to the network helps sometimes but not always and it's annoying and potentially bad for existing TCP connections.
So my question basically is: Is there some way to tell PulseAudio "Hey, just look again if you really can't find a network sound device."?
Edit: Unloading and reloading the module-zeroconf-discover with pacmd does not help either and it doesn't appear to be an avahi problem per se since avahi-browse -t --all | grep PulseAudio shows lots of right-looking stuff, even when the devices aren't listed in pavucontrol or pacmd list-sinks.
Edit 2: I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on both boxes for all the difference it might make.