How can I restart pulseaudio without having to logout?

Sometimes the pulseaudio service stops and it doesn't restart itself when I open an audio file with banshee or totem.

How I can make pulseaudio start again without having to logout?

I solved my problem.

1. Check if any pulseaudio instance is running:

   pulseaudio --check
   

   It normally prints no output, just exit code. 0 means running. Mine were not running, so I just advanced to step 3.

2. If any instance is running:

   pulseaudio -k
   

3. Finally, start pulseaudio again as a daemon:

   pulseaudio -D
   

4. Start banshee again and enjoy!

In a standard setup running pulseaudio -k restarts the daemon. Nothing else to do.

In case pulseaudio is not running typing pulseaudio without further options will start the daemon using defaults in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and /etc/pulse/default.pa.

User-defined settings in ~/.pulse/ or ~/.config/pulse/ will override system-wide settings. In case of issues it will often help to delete these directories before restarting pulseaudio.

For details see PulseAudio Wiki.

Pulseaudio is a user service, so:

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.service

Also there is this:

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio.socket

For checks replace restart with status.

Use the service command (Ubuntu 14.04 or older only):

sudo service pulseaudio restart

Following works for me on Ubuntu 18.04:

pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload