With the recent upgrade of pulseaudio to version 1.1-3, you will probably encounter error messages while playing an audio file as the ones below :
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:1220:(parse_def) show is not a compound
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:1686:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:24:26:Unexpected char
[AO_ALSA] alsa-lib: conf.c:3406:(config_file_open) /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it
I had the messages above with mplayer while listening to an on-line radio.
After searches, this has been recently filed as a bug : Debian bug 661095
Look at the following configuration file : /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf
Make a copy of it before doing any changes :
root@localhost:~# cp /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf.save
With your favorite text editor, remove all the lines starting at line 20 until the last line. Here is what you should have at last :
root@localhost:~# cat /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf
# This file is referred to by /usr/share/alsa/pulse.conf to set pulseaudio as
# the default output plugin for applications using alsa when PulseAudio is
# running.
pcm.!default {
type pulse
hint {
show {
@func refer
name defaults.namehint.basic
}
description “Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server”
}
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}
You can now play any audio file with no more error messages.
Hope this help !

thanks!
thank you so much!
I had this problem on my macbook running Debian Wheezy and now it’s solved!
regards from Brazil!
o/
No, this doesn’t help. The same proble with Debian wheezy(testing).
Ok, for me works this variant of a file:
pcm.!default {
type pulse
hint {
show on
description “Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server”
}
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
hint {
show on
description “Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server”
}
}
… I just had to unmute channels in alsamixer for aa audiocard which used.
thanks! sound is working again.
Thanks
Thanks!
I could finally get rid of this annoying warning.
I was getting this error when using ffmpeg to screencast my desktop, and this worked splendidly. Thank you much.
I’m running LMDE x64 with wheezy. This fix removed that error when I was running Pandora, so appreciate it.
Peace