How old is that meme? In the other hand, I never got HDMI sound on my htpc running, so there is that ^^
I spend more time dealing with my partners windows machine when it does an update getting their audio up and back to what it was, then I have with linux in 8 years (at least). And I did a major change from deb based into redhat base. And I dont even think its a bleeding edge distro issue, as I do run a Nobara system and that is based on fedora (which is still considered bleeding edge for the most part).
ALSA worked fine for me. Pulseaudio needed constant fixing.
Vintage Linux meme. I like it.
Pipewire + EasyEffects is perfection. No issues here :)
Funnily, I don’t have sound issues on pipewire (unless I turn on my excessively big easy effect default preset).
But windows? Oh boy windows… Listening to something after a teams call? Garbled sound. Locking your session then going back? No more sound. Connect the same Bluetooth headphones as the rest of the week? Volume get muted. Press the volume button? Nothing. Press the volume button while sound is playing? Oh hey now it works
Ever since Pipewire was introduced my sound just… works. Aside from missing drivers (super rarely) I have absolutely no issues.
I got super deep into synths and Linux audio years ago, and right around the same one Pipewire was starting to go mainstream. Shit just worked man!
Pulseaudio moment
Recently my speakers have been switching left/right. I was physically swapping them for a while, now I try and ignore it. I’m sure there’s some eldritch linux magic I too new to know like alsamixer that will fix it.
How are they connected
USB cable to the main speaker, proprietary cable from the first speaker to the second. It has blue tooth I’ve never connected to.
Thanks for the accessibility text!
Keep calm and
pulseaudio -k
I had a laptop with the opposite problem, it would just screech at full volume from the deepest pits of computer hell
had that problem with mint, randomly out of the blue a horrifyingly loud screech
There’s always sound.
It takes one second to start and there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
BUT THERE’S ALWAYS SOUND!
there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.
This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)
You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a ‘quantum’), temporarily with :
pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:
default.clock.min-quantum = 512Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:
systemctl --user restart pipewire(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)
Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don’t have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I’ll bump it up to 512.
I’m saving your comment for when I’ll reinstall the operating system in a few days. Thanks.
Any advice on the other issue that mutes all notification sounds? Last time I checked there were plenty of posts on how to disable power savings on pulse but not for pipewire.
If a sound plays but there’s no audio server to receive it and convert it to an analog signal, does it make a sound?
Sometimes there’s no sound because someone (looks at cat) ate the cables…
I never had this until pipewire
I had some issues in pre-2019 between alsa and pulse. I don’t think I have had any sound issues since then
Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.
Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to “why isn’t the sound working?” was usually “you tried to use anything but direct ALSA”.
Funny. My experience was the exact opposite. Maybe it was bad defaults which I never managed to fix, but I could never get two apps to use sound at the same time, which meant until Pulse became the standard and fixed everything, it was always constant battles between aRts, ESD, and apps that used neither.
I have not made the switch to Linux in the days where I still had a dedicated sound card. But I had extremely similar circumstances without a dedicated sound card. So I definitely believe you
In fact, I actually prefer jamming on my Linux boxes because of pulseeffects/easyeffects and its really nice EQ, AutoGain and other plugins.
https://github.com/megankde/pulseeffects https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects





