[SOLVED] No audio from Audacity on PipeWire-based system

flexibeast · Last edited by flexibeast on Fri Nov 08, 2024 10:47 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi all,

i'm having difficulties getting audio from Audacity on my PipeWire-based system.

Audio works fine in general, and in fact i recently got Rosegarden working without needing to futz around with JACK, and created the 'Rosegarden' wiki page to document what i learned.

However, in Audacity, a track will play - i.e. the level meters are moving appropriately - but there's no sound. i tried changing the Edit -> Preferences -> Audio Settings -> Playback setting to both 'pipewire' and my hardware device ("HDA Intel PCH: ALC 3246 Analog"), but this made no difference.

Also, Audacity takes an oddly long time to start up - around a minute or two - although it does eventually do so, unlike the experiences in this bug report. There's no output on the terminal during this time, although i noticed that Audacity flickers in and out of being listed in the 'Playback' tab of pavucontrol, several times.

It could be that the primary issue is that Audacity is built on PortAudio, which apparently doesn't yet support PipeWire.

i'm certainly willing to set up JACK with PipeWire to get Audacity working, but i've no experience with JACK - either as a standalone sound server, or as provided by PipeWire. For the latter, i've rebuilt PipeWire with the `jack-sdk` USE flag, portaudio with the `jack` flag (cf. the "JACK missing as a host" section of the Audacity page on the wiki), restarted my system to try to clean my slate, started Audacity, and changed the "Host" setting to "JACK Audio Connection Kit" - but still didn't get any sound, regardless of whether the "Playback" setting was "Easy Effects sink" or "Built-in Digital Audio Stereo (HDMI)", which are the two sinks i otherwise get audio from. This was also the case when i tried running Audacity via `pw-jack`, as described in the "Replacing JACK" section of the PipeWire page - is that still required, or is that information now out of date?

Basically, is anyone successfully running Audacity with PipeWire?
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szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3419

Works for me in both ALSA and JACK mode, and it connects to the playback device directly as well as to easyeffects.

flexibeast · Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2024 10:46 am Post subject:

@szatox:

Thank you! That `emerge` output of yours helped solve the problem: it turned out the `elogind` USE flag wasn't set on media-video/pipewire for some reason (perhaps because i'd disabled it to check some stuff for documentation purposes). i'll mark this as solved.
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