pipewire - severe issues with (no) sound, outages,...

[Adarion]

Hello everyone,

(subtle rant included, sorry)

I do have a few questions / issues around PipeWire.

As far as I perceive it pipewire is supposed to be the next big thing. The all-in-one-and-for-everybody-audio-solution.
Have pipewire and everything will be fine in terms of audio. (any maybe some video use cases)

I wish it was true.
Maybe I am doing it wrong.
Maybe the documentation steps were not clear / comprehensive enough?

I have several boxes with Gentoo here.
Most of them amd64 (openrc), I did not yet touch the older x86_32 ones.

Problems observed after switching to pipewire:

* no sound at all (silent system)
* kmix (in case of KDE) does not show a single device
* sound works for some programs, not for others
* changing volume in some adjusts system-wide volume (like back in pure ALSA?), which is pretty silly
(e.g. changing volume in audacious music player will also lower/raise volume in currently running/open mpv, games, whatnot)
* browser crashes as soon as sound is to be played (no matter the source)
(this problem is mostly gone, at least no crashes)
* browser getting stuck playing any video that includes sound
(very regular problem)
* browser playing video, however, no sound comes out
* browser getting stuck after some time, also, nothing else then will work on the system (no infomational "ding!" (e.g. on close file dialog, do you want to save yes/no/cancel), no mpv playback possible then (no sound sink found, bailing out) no anything (solution here: close the browser, wait 15 seconds, then sound is magically back)
(like the browser somehow got a hiccup and got stuck and blocked the entire sound device)
* lots of things worked on one system (e.g. audacious, gzdoom,...), but not browsers (firefox-bin, seamonkey,... - either no playback at all (video stops, I can yt-dlp it and the view via mpv, or playback but in silence))
* or: lots of things worked - however! - browser video conference had output - but no input (even though "it saw" the microphone). Fun fact: I could record sound then via audacity from the very mic, parallel to the video conference, but the conference would not pick up anything


There is only one single (Gentoo) system in my household that works flawless (let aside some old 32bit x86 boxes) - and that is the one that _never_ saw pipewire and still is 100% pulseaudio (can't update spectacle and xdg-desktop-portal there, but at least it works for video conferencing, which I definitely require!).

(browsers: firefox/firefox-bin, seamonkey, google-chrome, falkon,...)


So am I doing things wrong or is pipewire just borked?

(I know this post lacks detailed technical info, but these issues were so wide-spread over all my systems, it is just nerve-racking. The problem does not seem to be overly specific, so maybe there also is a broad approach to solve it.
I tried to migrate back to pulse with varying success. Most systems are running KDE (and some with optionally XFCE4 as fallback, haven't tried sound there I must admit). Oh, and qt usually was compiled without USE screencast as I do not intend to have this sort of funcitonality on a basic qt library level.)

What I would like to avoid are complete re-installations[*] or killing the entire ~/.config directory.

I just want to have a usable system. You know: Where kmix will "just work", or you have something like pavucontrol which would show you all the devices (input/output) and let you adjust volume and maybe L/R balance if needed. And sound, no matter the source. And no program being exclusive and blocking the entire sound chip. Sound players not interfering negatively with each other. Wasn't that the idea of "sound servers" to catch all sounds played and mix them correctly with low latency (and maybe applying filters like noise reduction if preferred) and then send them to the physical output?

[*] though compiling dev-qt/... ande kde-*/ or having rebuilds due to incompatible library changes often feels like a near-complete system reinstallation (re2, re2c, icu, poppler, boost, once libpng - anyone? Remember the drama?)
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[flexibeast]

i moved from PulseAudio to PipeWire a while ago - updating the PipeWire page as i went, to reflect what i learnt, as well as restructuring it more generally - and have been using it successfully since then, with few issues. (In fact, what i've occasionally said is that i've found PipeWire to be "a better Pulse than Pulse"; issues i was having with Bluetooth devices in the context of Pulse have decreased in the context of PipeWire.)

So, no, i wouldn't say that PW is just borked. Acknowledging that you've been having issues across multiple systems, could we perhaps try working out what's happening on just one of those systems, as a starting point? If so, could you please share the relevant configuration details for that system?