PipeWire making my mic super quiet: Extremely oversensitive Auto-Gain?

General system Gaming, sound and video
1

Hi all,
My microphone input on Endeavour will reduce in volume significantly by just speaking. I use an Audio Interface Mixer, and any gain/volume adjustments are done with physical dials and then sent as one input to the computer.

For some reason, just talking into my mic will descrease my volume by up to 40% ??
Here is pavucontrol before I speak into my mic:

image
image784×402 21.5 KB

And here is pavucontrol after speaking into my mic for about 10 to 20 seconds:
image
image775×406 21.7 KB

This makes any recordings of my voice extremely difficult as I need to keep readjusting the slider back up to 100%
Here is this behavour measured in audacity:

image
image1455×300 37.5 KB

However, what’s strange is how inconsistent this is! Sometimes it will decrease by 40%, sometimes 20%, the only consistency is that it always decreases.

Please help! Will provide any extra information as requested :slight_smile:

2

Some apps auto adjust the volume, any chat app like Discord running in the background?

3

Yes, but this behavior happens whether or not it is open. Even then, i believe discord’s ‘Automatic Gain Control’ setting is app-specific - im confused as to why this is happening system-wide

4

this is also happening for me… have you found a solution?

5

Not sure if its still relevant and if you still have the issue listed here, but what helped me with pipewire randomly lowering my input volume is adding this to my /etc/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/, the file should be named 10-adjustQuirkRules.conf, it should stop Discord and chromium apps to hijack your system input volume

pulse.rules = [
{
matches = [
{
# all keys must match the value. ! negates. ~ starts regex.
#client.name                = “Firefox”
#application.process.binary = “teams”
#application.name           = “~speech-dispatcher."
}
]
actions = {
update-props = {
#node.latency = 512/48000
}
# Possible quirks:"
#    force-s16-info                 forces sink and source info as S16 format
#    remove-capture-dont-move       removes the capture DONT_MOVE flag
#    block-source-volume            blocks updates to source volume
#    block-sink-volume              blocks updates to sink volume
#quirks = [ ]
}
}
{
# speech dispatcher asks for too small latency and then underruns.
matches = [ { application.name = "~speech-dispatcher.” } ]
actions = {
update-props = {
pulse.min.req          = 512/48000      # 10.6ms
pulse.min.quantum      = 512/48000      # 10.6ms
pulse.idle.timeout     = 5              # pause after 5 seconds of underrun
}
}
}
{
# prevent all sources matching “Chromium” from messing with the volume
matches = [ { application.name = “~Chromium.*” } ]
actions = { quirks = [ block-source-volume ] }

}
{
    matches = [ { application.process.binary = "Discord" } ]
    actions = { quirks = [ block-source-volume ] }
}

]