NO Sound. Wireplumber & Pipewire NOT Running or Starting

General system Newbie
1

For the past few days, I’ve had the occasional issue where I would lose sound. When I investigated it at the time, I couldn’t find much online or on my system to explain what was happening, other than all 3 services (Wireplumber, Pipewire and PipewirePulse) were sleeping. I would assume they should be awake as I’m attempting to play sounds.

Anyways, this happened again and after a reboot. Wireplumber and PipWire aren’t starting. I’m not sure how to start them manually, systemctl says they service is not found.

Here’s the Audio section from inxi:

Audio:
  Device-1: AMD Navi 10 HDMI Audio driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie:
    gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 bus-ID: 0c:00.1 chip-ID: 1002:ab38
    class-ID: 0403
  Device-2: AMD Family 17h HD Audio vendor: ASRock driver: snd_hda_intel
    v: kernel pcie: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16 bus-ID: 0e:00.3
    chip-ID: 1022:1457 class-ID: 0403
  API: ALSA v: k6.7.0-arch3-1 status: kernel-api
    tools: alsactl,alsamixer,amixer
  Server-1: sndiod v: N/A status: off tools: aucat,midicat,sndioctl
  Server-2: PipeWire v: 1.0.1 status: off with: 1: pipewire-pulse
    status: active 2: wireplumber status: off 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin
    4: pw-jack type: plugin tools: pactl,pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl

I’m adding this in case it is relevant, connection refused if I attempt to run pactl:

$ ps ax | rg wire ; pactl info
    919 ?        S<sl   0:00 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
   3199 pts/0    S+     0:00 rg wire
Connection failure: Connection refused
2

Try this… First, we want to see what sound services are running so do it with this:

systemctl list-units --no-pager |egrep “alsa|sound”

Assuming “sound.target” is among them, see if you can get a status for that:

systemctl status sound.target

If it’s not “active”, then try to restart it and check again.

systemctl restart sound.target
systemctl status sound.target.

Might get your sound restarted, but I don’t know if it fixes the underlying issue.

3

Thanks for posting, but:

  1. sound.target is present
$ systemctl list-units --no-pager | grep -E 'alsa|sound'
  sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:03.1-0000:0a:00.0-0000:0b:00.0-0000:0c:00.1-sound-card0-controlC0.device                 loaded active plugged   /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:0a:00.0/0000:0b:00.0/0000:0c:00.1/sound/card0/controlC0
  sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:08.1-0000:0e:00.3-sound-card1-controlC1.device                                           loaded active plugged   /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.1/0000:0e:00.3/sound/card1/controlC1
  alsa-restore.service                                                                                                    loaded active exited    Save/Restore Sound Card State
  sound.target                                                                                                            loaded active active    Sound Card
  1. sound.target is active:
systemctl status sound.target
● sound.target - Sound Card
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/sound.target; static)
     Active: active since Sat 2024-01-20 12:03:56 CST; 7min ago
       Docs: man:systemd.special(7)

But still no sound.

4

Hmmm…probably won’t help but you could try stopping and restarting:

systemctl stop sound.target
(verify status with systemctl status sound.target)
systemctl restart sound.target.
(verify status again)

5

Yeah, no change unfortunately.