PipeWire/troubleshooting

PipeWire troubleshooting

Refer also to the the "Troubleshooting" section of the WirePlumber page.

Output device is "Dummy Output"

If PipeWire is not detecting audio input/output devices even though the pipewire and wireplumber services are running, this might be because ACL support is missing. Make sure the acl USE flag is not disabled in /etc/portage/make.conf, and re-emerge if a change was made.

If seatd is being used, make sure the user is in the audio group.

On Intel Tiger Lake-H HD systems, the sys-firmware/sof-firmware package might need to be installed.

Screensharing doesn't work with Chrome

In chrome://flags, set "WebRTC PipeWire support" to "Enabled".

Clients unable to lock memory

If clients report being unable to lock memory, raise the value of RLIMIT_MEMLOCK:

# This both raises the max and sets the default lockable memory limit of every process running under a non-system account (except for nobody) from default 64 to 256 kilobytes (in increments of ''page size'')
1000:65533 - memlock 256

Crackling and stuttering

Crackling and stuttering might be reduced or eliminated by setting default.clock.min-quantum appropriately in pipewire.conf^[1] :

default.clock.min-quantum = 2048

A sound is played after certain actions

If a sound - such as a 'waterdrop' sound - is played after certain actions, e.g. after pressing Tab in XTerm, this might be the result of the PipeWire configuration enabling the x11-bell PipeWire module (e.g. because the X USE flag is enabled).

To disable this, either disable the X USE flag and re-emerge, or modify the relevant configuration file, e.g.:

context.properties = {
 module.x11.bell = false
}

No sound after resuming from sleep

If there's no sound after resuming from sleep, it might be that the monitor was still in a 'power save' mode when the system resumed. Ensure that the monitor is not in such a mode before resuming.

References

• Audio
• Multimedia