It was a minor annoyance. To get the mic to work, I had to cycle through a couple output options, then I could go back to input and select my mic (currently part of my webcam). It was working automatically prior to installing pipewire. So, I went to the ArchWiki. It suggested disabling acp and just going with ucm. That kinda worked, but it was a bit ugly. To be fair, it does appear that section of the wiki is still under development. So, I went here instead…
https://pipewire.pages.freedesktop.org/wireplumber/
Source material was much more helpful. I was able to tell wireplumber to auto-detect and connect to the best option (previously, it was giving more than one and neither became hot until I cycled the output).
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Thing is, I’m by no means an expert with this kind of software but I was able to bumble through the documentation enough to get it working the way I wanted. It appears that there’s a lot of flexibility built in to the setup so, I suspect, “tuning it to your system” is the norm.