"pulse" special device is not visible

[IonAgorria]

When one wants to control the PulseAudio via the special "pulse" device can set the device in the config manually, but is not visible in the device list.

[nkoep]

This is indeed a bit clunky. The problem is that the "devices" listed in the settings are actually available cards as returned by ALSA, and since cards and devices aren't synonymous in ALSA (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture#Concepts), the virtual pulse device never appears in the list. The reason why it works by manually defining card=pulse in volumeicon's config is that any card name that wasn't reported by ALSA via snd_card_next yet gets added to the list manually. A potentially nicer workaround would be to define "pulse" as the default device in your `~/.asoundrc* file, e.g.,

pcm.pulse {
    type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
    type pulse
}

pcm.default pulse
ctl.default pulse