I, like a lot of people, had issues with PulseAudio (PA) in our new flavor of Ubuntu. Though I had sound, I could not get the Volume Manger which allows you to adjust the volume of specific streams to work. My error specifically was a general "Connection Refused" so, here's what I did.
The following step may not be nessearry, I have isolated the problem, but only after I followed the instructions here. If you want to try to get PA working without making the configuration edit or downloads in the following post, got to Step2, but imo, I suggest following the link first. YMMV.
Step 1:
The (almost) Perfect Pulse Audio Setup
This link leads you to a Ubuntu Forums post. I highly suggest downloading the packages listed here. One note: the How-to talks about editting /etc/asound.conf - this file didn't exist for me, but I found out its ok to just go ahead and create it.
Step 2:
This is one of those rare times when you have restart your computer in Linux, and I mean your whole system.. not just your GUI. Go ahead and do so, and once you're logged back in before you play any sound or music open up a console session and type in
pulseaudio -D
PA should restart, and voilà, you should be able to start the Volume Manger and control your streams no problem. Lastly, to make the command "pulseaudio -D" run at start up, every start up, navigate to ~/.kde/Autostart in terminal, and type in
sudo nano pulseaudio
then put this into the text file:
#!/bin/bash
pulseaudio -D
save and quit
