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I feel this one. Used to daily drive Linux but due to a work requirement had to switch to Windows several years back. Windows has been getting shittier and shittier and I no longer need to use Windows for work and it only just gets shittier so I just switched to CachyOS and love it. Except the one and only issue I haven’t been able to fix is audio. I use a Bluetooth speaker on my computer and it cuts out randomly even using low bit rate audio streams. Tried switching pulseaudio to pipewire because the internet said I could increase the latency and that that would fix it but no dice.
Some Mediatek chips are doing this, that is bt audio cutting out while WiFi doing things. Nothing fancy, 1080p video on YouTube will cause that.
My pipewire seems to have issues with crackling audio and severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.
Still better than Windows.
Oh I had this issue and it drove me bonkers trying to fix it! I have to go digging a not to try and remember what fixed it in the end.
My pipewire seems to have issues with crackling audio and severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.
Pipewire’s default quantum (buffer size, effectively) is incredibly low, this is good for low latency audio but anytime your system is too busy to keep the buffers filled you get crackling.
If you look at
pw-topyou’ll see all of your devices and nodes. The quant column is probably 1 or a very small number for the devices.You can increase the quantum with this command. This only lasts until pipewire restarts:
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512At a sample rate of 48000, this is roughly a 10ms buffer. 1024 is 20ms, etc. You want it as low as possible without getting crackling. Start with 512 and adjust from there (you don’t have to use a power of 2, a quantum of 1234 works just as well).
severely dampening my mic and I have no clue why.
By default pipewire doesn’t do any ‘mic boost’, as Windows calls it. You can get the same effect by raising the maximum volume.
In your sound control panel you should be able to turn the mic up higher than 100%. In KDE Plasma, you can do this in System Settings -> Sound -> Configure Volume Controls… [top right button] -> Raise maximum volume.
Alternatively, you can use EasyEffects to add a compressor. This will boost your mic volume and also prevent it from getting too loud
Compressors basically reduce the dynamic range of an audio signal by attenuating loud sounds and boosting quieter ones, this would provide a better mix.
Other useful plug-ins are noise canceling, (kills background noise) and echo canceling (lets you play sound out of your speakers which won’t get picked up by your mic). Sometimes apps, like Discord, will do this signal processing for you while others, like Signal, do no signal processing.
Bluetooth headphones by any chance?
Nope, wired. Separate ports for input / output on the front of the case.
Read the arch wiki on troubleshooting pulse audio. I remember having this issue long ago.
The issue occurred yesterday gaming with friends and I didn’t have time to troubleshoot yet, but I’ll keep that in mind, thanks!
I’m still trying to figure out why the only real way of taking screenshots fast in Wayland is to do a video capture of the desktop with pipewire…
I don’t know what you mean. I can just hit the print screen key on my keyboard and have a screenshot in my clipboard.
I need it to automate fishing in Minecraft, and the normal way to take screenshots in Python (which is one line with PIL) on Linux went from at least 30 possible fps on X11 to 2 on Wayland. The only way to do it fast enough then is to use Pipewire. Which is one hell of a convoluted mess. (The next part of this whole mess will be finding a way to send mouse clicks without having Minecraft registering a mouse move too in case xdotools stop working)
You need the print screen key for something else is what you’re saying (I had trouble following your reply)?
Can only speak for KDE, but you can easily change the screenshot shortcut to something else in settings.
I actually had a sound issue the other day. Just no sound, how weird. It worked the day before. Checked wpactl, volumes etc, everything was fine and working. Restarted pipewire, still no sound.
Turns out my external mixer lost power because the powet socket was slightly loose.
Can’t believe Linux would do such a thing
all the new technology!!
oh, now there is no sound…
For we all live underground
Wow. I’ve just stepped out of the office for a rage break because pipewire shat the bed again. It’s amazing how sound seems to be a solved problem 5 or 10 years ago but now it’s just offal.
edit:
$ systemctl status --user pipewire Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined (consider using --machine=<user>@.host --user to connect to bus of other user)wheeeee
That’s not a pipewire problem, that’s a systemctl problem.
Failed to connect to user scope bus via local transport: $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not defined
The error means systemctl --user can’t reach your user’s D-Bus session because the required environment variables aren’t set. This typically happens when you’ve switched users via su or sudo rather than logging in directly, because htose don’t initialize a full systemd/PAM session. It could also be that your session wasn’t properly initialized by systemd-logind or a number of other things. Try spawning a proper user session:
sudo machinectl shell your_username@and try the systemctl command again.
Yeah, it was working fine but then it got really hard to use pulse. Just when it was stable, we get a few good years before having to switch to a new unstable thing, since pulse lost support.
I used to have crackling issues with pulseaudio. It needed restarting constantly. Not issue since the switch to pipewire. So my experienced was the absolute opposite of yours.
I never understood why we didn’t just stick with ALSA. OSS was crap, certainly, but ALSA seemed to do the job.
Depending on the output device it’s still using ALSA underneath (e.g. Bluetooth output instead is given to the BT stack), PipeWire is dealing with managing and routing the audio output rather than actually performing it.
fake. pipewire is actually awesome.
that nagging sleep issue though? yeah…
Sleep is my favourite function to complain about, it breaks shit at random on windows and Linux, nobody seems to know why or how. The fact that sleep works as well as it does on consoles and steam deck is a miracle to me.
actually awesome
It shits the bed about weekly for me. I’m glad it’s working reliably for someone.
pipewire was actually the magic end of all my audio issues on all my computers. what kind of setup do you run?
This is a joke right? Yesterday I saw a post that outlook was a problem for them
Yes it’s a joke referencing the two Outlook instances issue, but for Linux people
Haha thanks. I feel dense in retrospect
Sometimes satire is hard to detect in this joke of a reality we’re living in.
Ain’t that the truth. Have a good evening!
They’re not supposed to have both installed.
Its not real its referring to the issues they had with outlook
Pipewire is newer and emulates PulseAudio so that it can be used as a drop-in replacement. There’s literally a command called
pipewire-pulserelated to this.It makes me wonder if they really have both installed or are mistaking Pipewire’s emulation for an active PulseAudio installation, and so it’s just Pipewire that’s acting up.
I’d say reboot, but being in space might be one of those times where that’s a non-starter. In which case, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty unpicking system hooks and trying to reattach them all again as and when Pipewire’s working again, assuming it doesn’t do that automatically.
I never had a problem with either Pipewire or real PulseAudio back when that was current. I had motherboard sound physically pop, requiring the purchase of a separate sound card, but never a driver issue, so I can’t even imagine what might be going on.
I’m pretty sure this is a meme based on the real report that they had 2 instances of outlook on windows and not real.
Wait, they had two instances of not real? They are learning too much.
Dad, don’t do this in front of my friends. You’re embarrassing me.
Sorry I am autistic and often don’t know how to properly formulate my thoughts into sentences :D
You’re in the right place, most social media users can’t properly formulate their thoughts into sentences, lol.
Real talk, though: why has Linux taken at least five tries (OSS, ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, PipeWire) to get audio right?!
Ohhhhhh the newbies don’t remember EsounD (
EnlightenmentEnlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn’t work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don’t realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.OSS came first, then got replaced by ALSA after it became proprietary.
PulseAudio is a userspace audio server to which programs connect. It manages audio settings per app, then sends everything to ALSA. JACK is the same but with a focus on low latency.
PipeWire is a modern drop-in replacement for both, and also has support for video on Wayland.
And then there’s also sndio, ported from OpenBSD. This does basically the same thing as OSS/ALSA.
That’s the thing about open source. Someone always thinks they can do better
That’s not a feature thats exclusive to open source though. Circular reasoning like this just distracts from the fact that software just like hardware is constantly evolving, even in personal spaces. Thinking someone can do better has no relevance on the “open source” aspect or the political leaning.
You mean someone thinks they need to do better not by enhancement but by complete replacement. See: Systemd and its own flailing.
SystemD knows what it has to do.
everything
I’m still waiting for the latency to be viable for playing guitar with an audio interface.
I’m using pipewire just fine to do so? I just needed to set the buffer size to something appropriately low and I’ve had no issues from popewire’s side
Holy audio
New tip just dropped
Maybe it’s time to give it a shot again. Does pipewire have similar functionality to voicemeeter the virtual audio cables?
Never used it, but I use something called pipewire graph or something (I’m on vacation and I can’t be bothered sorry heh)
Funny thing, but it’s windows I got problem sound problems with. Randomly decide to ignore mic, speakers doesn’t get out of “phone call quality mod”. Every time I need to disconnect then reconnect just for my colleagues to hear me out.
Linux? No problem. Easy effects run perfectly too (except when low CPU availability… But everything at that point gets problems)
Being in IT with windows 11 is awful.
“Why isn’t my mic/audio working?”
Me: “Idk, restart the computer”
“That fixed it. I don’t understand, it was just working yesterday. Why did it stop working?”
Me: “Windows 11 sucks…”
Not to mention how awful it is being in a teams call as the IT guy and my mic isn’t working because, again, windows is ass
And the awful thing is when you’re the only one having this specific issue. I’m the “bad audio” guy, another is the “VPN never works”, etc…
Systemd just keeps asking me for govt id, I didn’t bring it with me to space
Thanks Dylan
is it me or is this portrait intentionally stylized to look sloppy
I think the answer is that slop tends to make everything look well lit and soft like a portrait. So by association, portraits now look like slop.
Yeah I guess that is actually what is happening… combined with… 99% of pictures people see these days are taken with phones or webcams, with different methods of doing color balancing, and different standards for lighting and color grading.
Whereas it used to be, in the before days, in the last century… you’d probably most often see a person pictured in either a school photo, a mugshot, a portrait done for some other occasion, or basically a polaroid, which would be recognizabley differently exposed/styled (basically) from the rest.
wdym?
Astronauts are following the same photo format as they’ve always done, and the penguin is wearing a tuxedo.
The image looks like the contrast was increased too much for unknown reasons.
Huh.
To me it looks like an actually very well colorbalanced photo… maybe something to do with image formats, different kinds of viewing devices, some kind of HDR process working oddly?
EDIT:
Also, the background, the backdrop, its … the actual pattern of the material is that its lighter and more colorful in the center, and then does a kind of noisy circular taper to black, toward the edges.
Thats not an exposure or contrast error, its an intentional choice, meant to emphasis the center of the image, but also allow the well lit people on the edges to be clearly discernable, in detail.
Its a fairly common practice in more traditional portrait photography.
What the hell linux distros are so far back in time that they have audio issues? I haven’t had to do anything in maybe the past decade and even when distro hopping it always worked?
Or is it super niche hardware? I haven’t heard of any real people using anything other than mobo built in audio since like 2007.
It’s a joke about the two outlook instance issue
I mean sure but, like… 2005 called, they want their mail order ubuntu cd back.
“lol it’s just satire” meanwhile people are thinking audio, gaming, whatever is an issue on linux
as a few year old linux convert, getting used to it is the biggest hurdleI just installed Pop!_OS this week and have this problem constantly. The point I had to write a service to watch for all my audio devices to vanish and restart the others.
