Pipewire woes

General system Multimedia
#1

I can’t make Pipewire work on a new OS install and I’ve spent well over two hours now attempting every possible fix I’ve found on the web with absolutely no results. Pipewire is running, but there are no audio devices available.

I have Wireplumber, pipewire, and pipewire-pulse installed. All three are running.
I have purged all their configs and reinstalled all of them including their dependencies.

pipewire-pulse.service - PipeWire PulseAudio
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire-pulse.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-04-25 07:05:18 CEST; 5min ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire-pulse.socket
   Main PID: 623 (pipewire-pulse)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 19066)
     Memory: 6.4M
        CPU: 12ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire-pulse.service
             └─623 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse

● pipewire.service - PipeWire Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-04-25 07:05:18 CEST; 3min 40s ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire.socket
   Main PID: 621 (pipewire)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 19066)
     Memory: 5.4M
        CPU: 18ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire.service
             └─621 /usr/bin/pipewire

● wireplumber.service - Multimedia Service Session Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/wireplumber.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2022-04-25 07:05:18 CEST; 3min 40s ago
   Main PID: 622 (wireplumber)
      Tasks: 4 (limit: 19066)
     Memory: 13.7M
        CPU: 91ms
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/wireplumber.service
             └─622 /usr/bin/wireplumber

The wireplumber service also spits out this which (presumably?) is what is causing it:

Apr 25 07:05:18 main systemd[612]: Started Multimedia Service Session Manager.
Apr 25 07:05:18 main wireplumber[622]: can't open control for card hw:2: No such file or directory
Apr 25 07:05:18 main wireplumber[622]: Card can't get card_name from card_index 1
Apr 25 07:05:19 main wireplumber[622]: can't open control for card hw:1: No such file or directory

Solutions, please?

#2

Not a solution per se, but a temporary fix if you still wish to use pipewire you can replace wireplumber with pipewire-media-session - - they conflict with each other, so installing one will replace/remove the other, but they both act as session managers for pipewire, it’s just that wireplumber is the newer/recommended package.

I myself am currently using pipewire, with the pipewire-media-session since it more or less just works, but it is not as customizable as wireplumber is, so that may entirely depend on your use case. I just need a bluetooth speaker/headphones to work and that’s it so this solution works for me just fine. But if you need wireplumber for whichever reason(s), feel free to ignore this, but hopefully it can at least get your audio working while you find other solutions.

Source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Session_manager

2 Likes
#3

Should have mentioned I had tried pipewire-media-session as well. Same result. Well, it doesn’t spit out the ‘cant open control for card’ messages, but there are still no audio devices.