Lost audio in Sid

[stevesr0Member]

I have done a few Sid upgrades without checking audio and tonight when I launched X via startx after doing tonight’s upgrade, I find that VLC and audacious cannot play music. When I try to switch Pipewire on in the “toggle” gui, the message pops up that Pipewire is NOT on and will NOT start at the next boot.

Running alsamixer (even as sudo) open produces the message

cannot open mixer; host is down

Anyone else have new audio problems after recent upgrades?

N.B. Given the current problem with rsyslog and libfastjson4, I wonder whether this is another manifestation of that conflict.

Comments/advice appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Xunzi_23Member]

Anyone else have new audio problems after recent upgrades?

Since about a week, beeen using stable as unable to get either alsa, or the
sounddegrader frontend pipewire jack working.

I assume this is part of the we are deprecating alsa policy from upstream.
they mean deprecate alsa support.

Alsa is the base sound system, the systemd evangelists and a microsoft employee
are yet again advancing the cause.
Make linux a buggy mess worse than windoze 11

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by Xunzi_23.

[sybokMember]

See also (possibly related post): http://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/qt-deprecates-plain-alsa-support/

[stevesr0Member]

Thanks Xunzi and sybok,

I had seen that post but didn’t put it together as the possible cause. I will check to see if I did a recent upgrade of qt5 that I can safely downgrade and see if ALSA and Pipewire come back.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by stevesr0.

[Xunzi_23Member]

roxterm is gone too, now time to try and get my brother printer working on stable.

[XaverMember]

Sound is still ok on my upgraded Sid.
It is plain ALSA plus apulse – no Pulseaudio and no Pipewire.
Audacious, Aslaplayer, mpv, SMplayer and Firefox have sound as usual.
Alsamixer can be opened too.

So silence after upgrade is not caused by qt5 updates alone. There must be other reasons.

[stevesr0Member]

Hi Xaver,

Thanks for comment.

I managed to launch alsamixer using
alsamixer -c0

and then have gotten celluloid, audacious and VLC to play after adjusting the settings to use alsa without Pipewire.

Now to reflect and hope some knowledgeable antiXer explains what is screwed up with Pipewire and how to fix it, while I blunder along <g>.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by stevesr0.

[stevesr0Member]

Trying to revive my noobie understanding of Pipewire.

Noted that on the Sid install, a runtime directory (/run/user/1000 according to echo $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR) is supposedly set, but isn’t created.

On the antiX23 install on another computer, an equivalent file (/tmp/1000/.run) is present with several files related to pipewire.

So if I get the /run directory (or /tmp directory) running again, perhaps Pipewire will work again.

[ProwlerGrMember]

Turnstile can take care of mounting the rundir for you.
Which init are you using?

[stevesr0Member]

Hi ProwlerGr,

Thanks for commenting.

The Sid install is sysvinit.

I know nothing about Turnstile, having only seen a few posts recently mentioning it.

I see that you are Turnstile’s developer.

Happy to try it, although I would mostly like to know what went wrong and how to fix it.

[stevesr0Member]

Hi all,

Several points.

(1) Creeping senility — I worked on setting up Pipewire in 2022 and there is a longish thread which documented what worked. I forgot about that and started on this issue from noobie scratch.

(2) I have identified three problems in play in my situation-each potentially solvable.

(a) Toggle-pipewire – if you have Pipewire disabled at start, there are some situations (posted by Robin, abc-nix or anti-apXos) where Pipewire can’t be started. my solution was to remove toggle-pipewire.

(b) Alsa-libs upgrade to 1.2.15 have broken Pipewire audio. Fix is to downgrade to version 1.2.14. (Pipewire launches but only shows dummy audio in PAVU) (On htop, there are a multiple of copies of pipewire, pipewire-pulse and wireplumber).

(c) Somehow, the script from Kenny Levinsen (sp?) to enable launching of /run/user/1000 stopped working automagically, so I resorted to using chown before launching xorg with startx. That enabled pipewire to start today. Not sure, if the alsa-lib change is responsible for this issue.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by stevesr0.

[stevesr0Member]

Update.

The Sid system is currently under repair.

However, on my Lenovo computer that I recently upgraded from antiX-21 to antiX-23, I didn’t have Pipewire installed before the upgrade.

So yesterday, I installed the antiX-23 Pipewire packages. However, it didn’t launch, until I modified the .desktop-session/startup file to match the settings in my Sid Openbox system. On that install, I had individual launch statements for pipewire, pipewire-pulse and Wireplumber.

After that edit, pipewire, pipewire-pulse and TWO instances of Wireplumber showed up in htop and PAVU displayed “dummy output”.

Today, after rereading a number of posts on the antixforum, I realized that separate startup entries for pipewire and Wireplumber could cause problems such as a “dummy output”. After removing the Wireplumber line, Pipewire and alsamixer started working together!

So, after I repair the fan in the Fujitsu system running Sid, I will recheck to see if there are multiple Wireplumber entries in htop on that system. If so, I will try deleting the Wireplumber entry, and then see if the user 1000 directories in one or both systems then contain Pipewire entries.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by stevesr0.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by stevesr0.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by stevesr0.

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