On my (headless) Linux box at home, I have a soundcard with digital out (optical), going straight to my amp. I can use various music-playing servers to let me select the music to play remotely, with the output emitting from the server.

However for reasons that completely elude me, the ALSA system auto-mutes the output at the end of every song. It's infuriating.

ALSA does indeed have an "auto-mute" setting, but I have ensured it is set to off.

I wondered if the issue was with PulseAudio for a long time, but the problem still occurs after reconfiguring things to go direct to ALSA.

As a work-around, I could modify the open-source software I'm using, to get it to run an unmute command after starting to play a track, but that's ridiculous. Surely there's a way to just stop it auto-muting on close?

I don't suppose anyone else has ever encountered this, or found a solution?

Toby