In current master the following line in default.pa causes pulse to fail loading: load-module module-null-sink sink_name=null sink_properties=device.description="sink description" A description string without a space is OK, so is load-module module-null-sink sink_name=null sink_properties=device.description="sink\ description" (correct with the space in the description, but load-module module-null-sink sink_name=null sink_properties=device.description=sink\ description (with the space escaped, but the property value not quoted) does not work. Is this how it is supposed to work with the new json loading, or is it a parsing bug? I would expect the first example with just the quoting and no escaping to work. (This is also how it is documented on wiki:Modules) Maarten