I have a realy good feeling that the issue occur when the phone has been contacted to a certain kind of sound Bluetooth and the connection has been cut.
I will test this further.
My report from yesterday happened on a clean boot with no bluetooth connections made or bluetooth even enabled. I had rebooted my phone in the afternoon on Friday, then the alarm failed to go off Saturday morning.
Today this happened yet again, again causing me to almost miss an appointment. It just so happens that today is also a Saturday 
What happened is that I had set an extra alarm half an hour before my regular alarm to make sure I had some extra time available. Then in the morning the alarm went off, but there was no sound (only the vibration). Half asleep I thought that this was my ‘extra time’ alarm and I had just forgotten to enable sound and so I snoozed it.
What had actually happened, I found out, is that somehow the first alarm had failed altogether (there is no way to control ring/vibration), and I was snoozing my regular alarm (which was already set ‘too late’).
I don’t know how the first alarm failed, but I don’t believe I slept through its vibrations, as a new alarm appears to be created in ‘enabled’ state, so I’m pretty sure it was active when I went to sleep.
Sadly, the sudden lack of audio happened to me already twice on the 10 III (the second time yesterday). Shortly speaking, out of nowhere the device stops producing ANY sounds. At the same time, volume control buttons stop reacting too (pressing them has no effect, there are no volume level bars shown, etc).
This is a very serious issue (I missed an important call because of that since there was no ringtone) and I really hope it’ll be considered urgent and taken care of.
EDIT: Video freezing (causing that the entire application playing the video - e.g. Gallery - stops responding) happens regularly, too. Quite annoying, but not as serious as sudden disappearance of audio which happens unnoticed and leads to missed calls, alarms, messages, etc.
Confirm! Happens time to time ( when disconnect bt car audio for example, no 100% in that case, but sometimes)
Command below helps in most cases
systemctl --user restart pulseaudio
I am still super curious why systemd doesn’t restart it automatically.
But as far as I know pulseaudio gets killed by the OOM killer. And if you tweak it as described here, problem gets less frequent.
But to actually fix the problem, the systemd service would have to be tweaked somehow, so it detects pulseaudio problem and restarts it (it is already set to always restart, but for some reason it doesn’t work), pulseaudio would have to get excluded from the OOM Killer, which I don’t think is possible, or we would have to wait for a new OOM Killer daemon, which can choose which app to kill, which will probably take a ton of time.
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Perhaps a watchdog could do the trick? Now, what’s the actual condition we can check?
Those are the contents of /usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service contains the following.
[Service]
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/pulseaudio
# Wait until system PulseAudio daemon has completely shut down before
# starting user session daemon.
ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c "while [ -f /run/pulse/pid ]; do sleep 1; done"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pulseaudio --daemonize=no $CONFIG
Restart=always
RestartSec=1
Type=notify
Restart=always means it will will restart it not just on error, but but if the process stops in any way. At least I think that is what it should do if the service was enabled. But for me, it was disabled for some reason.
systemctl --user status pulseaudio.service
● pulseaudio.service - PulseAudio
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
So now I did systemctl --user enable pulseaudio.service we will see if my device explodes, or maybe it will fix it?
Otherwise it this doesn’t work, I would look into Type=notify and systemd messaging and try to catch if when pulseaudio stops working, if it creates any message.
In June I reported that the bug occurred to me after using PureMaps/GPS (see the earlier posts in this thread). When using PureMaps for navigation, I connect the phone to car audio via Bluetooth. Accordingly, the bug may well be Bluetooth-related according to my experience. But: the bug did not occur when I used the car’s Bluetooth connection for hands-free calls. I don’t no whether this gives any clue or not - just to let you know
Are you all sure that gps is affecting this? I have 10mk3 only for few days. Today is the first time it occurs. After a long car drive without using gps. One thing that changed I connected phone to car audio system. Listen to online music, made some calls. Everything worked until the point I disconected phone from car multimedia. I needed my phone wokring so i did rebooted it.
But if it occurs again and in better circumstances I will test it further
At least I am not at all sure that it is GPS related. It might be a mere coincidence because it occurred after using PureMaps - with GPS AND with TTS, i.e. verbal instructions. So it could be related to Bluetooth audio alone.
I only get this bug, when using gps. In the last months it never occured only after using the gps. So, i always reboot after gps use.
The script restart condition doesn’t apply if pulseaudio process doesn’t die but gets messed up inside, i.e. sound stops working. That’s why I asked (thought out loud) about the actual condition we could check here.
Well, dmesg gets flooded with the error messages already posted, they could give us a hint…
Wouldn’t it be possibke to write a script with checks dmesg output for the error message and restarts pulseaudio if the message occurs?
I wrote a script to act on a dbus signal for another issue, if Pulse really sends a singnal there, then all it needs is changing the signal and command executed. It will even work as a user service and not a root one.
But does it send a dbus signal? I never checked.
In my situation this seems to be repeatable. Three times disconecting from car multimedia resulted in no sound afterwards
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This comment: Xperia 10 III audio and video problems trigger after a period of time in use - #26 by elkiaer
uses the command pulseaudio --check.
Can someone confirm that this command exits 0 when everything is OK and not-0 when the bug occurs?
If so one could very easily write a watcher service for this.
I use the 10 III with my car kit regularly and it never happened after that. But I’ve got an old and simple car kit, only HFP, HSP and PBAP profiles, no multimedia stuff like A2DP.
I drive 2000 Honda Accord with non-original simple bluetooth able radio. Nothing fancy but Im not sure what profiles it uses.
I am now 99,9% shure it is the Bluetooth that cause the problem.
I connected the phone to the Bluetooth in the car and got the sound issue.
I must also mention that the phone also was connected to my Amarfit GTS. I can have the Amarfit GTS connected to the phone without getting sound issues.