I noticed these warning generated by PulseAudio:

% pulseaudio --kill
% pulseaudio --start -v
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to open cookie file '/home/livibetter/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
W: [pulseaudio] authkey.c: Failed to load authorization key '/home/livibetter/.config/pulse/cookie': No such file or directory
I: [pulseaudio] main.c: Daemon startup successful.

There is no ~/.config/pulse directory and they doesn’t seem to be affecting anything — because there is a reason for it — I just don’t like to have them.

At first, I created that directory, restarted, didn’t help. I read Gentoo’s wiki, began to think it might have something to do with Systemd or ConsoleKit, I didn’t have the later for years.

Reading more search results and saw this reply:

The warnings are not serious. If the cookie exists in its old location (/home/Larry/.pulse-cookie), pulseaudio will use that. I get those same warnings and everything is working fine. We shouldn’t print those warnings - doing that is a bug.

— Tanu

It was there:

% ll ~/.pulse-cookie
-rw------- 1 livibetter livibetter 256 Sep  6  2011 /home/livibetter/.pulse-cookie

I moved it to the correct location right away:

# mkdir -p ~/.config/pulse
% mv ~/.pulse-cookie ~/.config/pulse/cookie

Problem solved.

The cookie location must be changed after I upgraded PulseAudio from 2.1 to 5.0 in the end of last year, but never saw the message until I was trying to clean up some X stuff.

I think it should print those warnings, but it’s a bug of incomplete messages, it should tell user that PulseAudio has loaded the file from a fallback location successfully, right after the warning or with, so we can know what really is going on.