Giocoso 3 - The Administration Menu : Reset PulseAudio Server

This is a seriously obscure menu option that you should almost never take -and I've agonised over whether to include it in the program at all. It may well disappear in a future release!

The reason for its existence is simply that when I was developing Giocoso Version 3, I was using a Raspberry Pi 4 as my main music playback device. My Topping E30 USB DAC was plugged into the Pi, and everything played just fine... until it would mysteriously stop working! This would fairly consistently happen if I ever paused playback for quite a while: resuming playback from the point previously reached would result in mere silence. I found by trial and error that if I restarted the Pi's PulseAudio server before attempting a resume, I could resume with audio sounding as normal. So, to make restarting the PulseAudio server as convenient as possible, I added in Administration menu Option 8.

I later switched to running my music via an ancient HP 'thin client' PC, however: despite that machine's age and feeble CPU, it nevertheless manages to pause and resume music perfectly and I've accordingly never needed to reset the PulseAudio server on it.

Now, it's known that the Pi 4 has fairly flakey USB 3 support, and I accordingly suspect that pausing the Giocoso music playing process for a long time on that specific device somehow caused the Topping E30 DAC to lose its connection with the Pi. Restarting the PulseAudio server made the Pi re-discover the DAC device and thus music playback could work once more. For any non-Pi device with non-flakey USB support, therefore, I strongly suspect that this menu option will never be required and accordingly should never be taken... but I've left it available, just in case, for any Pi 4 users out there.

I hear good things about the Raspberry Pi 5's much more robust and standard support for USB 3 standards, so I'm hoping that Pi 5 and later users won't have the need to restart PulseAudio periodically anyway. I do not have a Pi 5 to test that on, however, so it remains conjecture on my part.


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