FUCK #PulseAudio. I just replaced it with #PipeWire which worked immediately. Absolutely done with PA and it's fucking insane bugs and weird weird weird shit forever. Didn't even need to have to do anything with PipeWire. It just worked out of the box. Magic. Hope it stays this way. Cross your fingers. Fuck I miss ALSA days. That shit was easy.
I learnt something important about Linux audio last night.
I noticed that I had no sound in X-Plane 12 (a flight simulator) while also being in a Discord call in Firefox. Apparently, certain FMOD applications check if PulseAudio is installed and fall back to ALSA if it isn't. Now, I have PipeWire installed to fix the mess that is Linux audio once and for all. So TECHNICALLY PulseAudio is not installed. And that's exactly what X-Plane detected, which then tried to gain complete control over the sound hardware through ALSA, which it couldn't.
The "fix" was to symlink /bin/pulseaudio to /bin/true to make it look like PulseAudio is available which tricked X-Plane into going through PulseAudio (and therefore through PipeWire) instead.
That was one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered.
Does your distro come with PipeWire? (/usr/bin/pipewire exists)
If so, does it fake the existence of PulseAudio? (pulseaudio --check doesn't return an error)
I really wonder how other distros than Arch handle this kind of issue. :drgn_think:
Spent >1h adjusting the volume of my six #surround#speakers with pavucontrol (pretty much the only tool that allows doing this with #PipeWire, and previously #PulseAudio) & Eva's OP.
My balance seems totally wacky because:
the speakers on the right go through an analog RCA coupler, and apparently this significantly reduces signal? I had to lower the two left speakers' volume to compensate;
the center speaker is at the rear, but I kept it loud to make actors/singers' voices easier to hear.
How is it after so many years #Linux still manages to totally fuck up the most basic and common use of #Bluetooth (audio)?
Every Bluetooth device I own connects to my Android phone without a hiccup. Every Bluetooth device I've tried (a subset of the first group) works without a hitch on the Windows machine at work.
But my main Linux box at home? About half of them don't work.
It should be a fucking embarrassment, but it seems the F/OSS crowd doesn't "grok" shame.
#Bluetooth is a fiendishly complicated protocol. I've used it on-and-off since about 2008 or so. #Android uses a completely different stack to desktop Linux. Things may be better on Windows, but there were as many as 3 different BT stacks for Windows (Toshiba, Widcomm, Microsoft).
Early attempts used an #ALSA kernel driver for Bluetooth… worked, but 8kHz mono is not the way I like to listen to music. And I'd imagine, unless your choice of music is 1930s swing, probably not yours either.
BlueZ (the standard Bluetooth stack on most Linux systems) pivoted across to doing it in user-space using PulseAudio. That worked okay for A2DP one-way audio, but for full-duplex audio, it is limiting. Notably, I found I couldn't get mSBC CODEC working, so full-duplex audio was 8kHz not 16kHz.
Most of the effort is going into linking #BlueZ and #pipewire, which I think will be the #PulseAudio successor (and may also displace #JACK.. as it has features of both systems).
Pipewire was written to do video actually (webcams), but then evolved to do audio too out of necessity. It's experimental, but I find works more reliably with Bluetooth. (And plays nicer with sound cards than JACK.)
Whenever I see comments like this about #Wayland I always have to ask, who do you think would be developing this new protocol? Every single #Linux graphics developers agrees that Wayland is where we're going, the problem is nobody agrees on how it should look
@forrestguid Propably because it was more feasible to do that replacement, as Pipewire isn't just an audio subsystem but an entire multimedia codec and playback pipeline.
Also replacing jack and other tools and flexibly reroute any audion/video stream to any encoder/decoder or playback device and integrating with VAAPI and hardware drivers for said codecs.
#PipeWire is way more general than #PulseAudio and also it does fix a lot of issues, similar to how noone honestly wants #SysVinit back.
It’s now the second time that, when updating my #Gentoo box, this happens:
pipewire[31450]: segfault at 7fab31fb3020 ip 00007fab3803aa4e sp 00007fab32ebafc0 error 4 in libspa-audioconvert.so[7fab38015000+4c000] likely on CPU 1 (core 1, socket 0)
leaving my computer without any sound until I do something about it. Is there a way to get my sound back without rebooting the whole system? It’s rather annoying, and it feels like sound on #Linux has become a mess.
#PulseAudio was starting to work somewhat reliably, so the fd.o people decided it was time to break everybody's setups again by moving over to #PipeWire which is a drop-in replacement except when it's not, for example for everybody using pacmd.
On an unrelated note, I just finished adapting my #AwesomeWM audio widget to use pactl (which requires multple popen calls to get the current state) instead of pacmd (that allowed the entire state to be retrieved with a single popen).
J'ai le son qui varie pendant quelques secondes de plus en plus fréquemment depuis quelques semaines...
J'ai d'abord cru que la #VM du serveur #PulseAudio ramait un peu avec les chaleurs... mais je ne vois pas de souci de charge système ou de mémoire saturée...
Donc je me pose la question d'un souci matériel... Carte audio #SoundBlaster versus caisson du 5.1, telle est la question ! #SoundSystem#homelab
Having a weird issue after switching to #pipewire from #pulseaudio The #kde volume indicator seems to be locked so that it can only go up and down one sound level, but you can change it normally from the settings
I tried to play #2MB#MineRacer in this Debian. There are no sounds. The game is too old to play sounds through #pipewire I thought it would use the #PulseAudio emulation, like other noise-making programs do. #GNU#Linux#Debian No! this is NOT a bug report or complaint. Let's see what audacity will do.
One of the issue preventing #LinuxMobile distros from shipping a #PipeWire / #libcamera camera stack is the fact that it requires #wireplumber as session manager, which again does not always play nicely with #pulseaudio, if that is still used as sound server.
Unfortunately switching to PW for sound is not always possible yet because some mobile-specific packages depend on PA. So if you want to help with camera enablement, please consider helping with issues such as https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/wys/-/issues/13 :)
I am once again embarking down the long hard road of.. getting audio to work in Linux.
I have a Intel NUC, it has a headphone jack on the front, and HDMI on the back. I can.. kind of get audio through HDMI when I 'speaker-test'; but it fails with a error after emitting static.
I can't get anything out of the headphone jack.
Please invoke positive thoughts of our Lord and Savior Linus in the hopes that I get this solved today.
Today I tried out my airpods on Linux, just for fun. I wanted to see how well that was handled.
Very good, I do have to say. Noise cancelling and transparency mode work by holding the stem, sliding your finger up or down controls the volume as you'd expect. The only things that seem to be unsupported is playback control. The connection is also very stable and doesn't drop out, and pipewire even provides high fidelity playback using AAC codec. Much better than pulseaudio! #AirPodsPro2#linux#pipewire#pulseaudio
In my first thread about Linux desktop usage, I didn't talk about audio. I wanted to focus on how let down a lot of the blind people using it, or those who've at least tried it felt.
But now, it is time to express myself once again, this time about the audio subsystem of Linux and how it is making it unbeliveably hard to us to use the system, even without a GUI. For those of you that went through my first thread, this was the tiny reference about needing to be a power user to use Linux, the moment you're blind. I will not focus on other disabilities here as I don't suffer from them myself. If other folks do, feel free to comment on how it might be for you! #alsa#blind#linux#pipewire#pulseaudio
I installed EasyEffects on Fedora today, added several effects and tweaked them a bit just based on my tastes while listening to streaming music through Firefox.