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Pipewire fixed my USB speaker

  1. linux
  2. gentoo

I only notice PipeWire from a hot hacker news headline this morning, the top comment mentioned that it can replace PulseAudio caught my attention.

I had some struggles with PulseAudio before. The biggest one is that my USB speaker (Sony SRS-HG10) stopped working since I updated my kernel to 5.12. I have tried a lot of fixes, tweaking kernel configs, clean PulseAudio caches, etc. Finally, I gave up and wore a headphone instead.

After reading the ArchWiki page and Gentoo Wiki page about PipeWire I find it’s quite easy to replace PulseAudio with it.

  • Stop PulseAudio from auto spawning. Edit /etc/pulse/client.conf and un-comment line autospawn = no

  • start PipeWire when X starts. It’s possible to add it to any X start script like .xinirc or .xprofile, I did it in my i3/config 

    exec --no-startup-id pipewire

That’s it. I restarted i3, opened up a Youtube video. BOOOOOM, everything works.

Just to be sure. 

ps -aux | grep pulse
# make sure no PulseAudio process running

pactl info | grep "Server Name"
# : Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 0.3.30)

Open pavucontrol and switch to USB speaker, it works too, congratulations (to me)!

There is also a ticket in Gentoo bug tracker discussing how to avoid installing PulseAudio entirely. I’m looking forward to it.