Arch Linux

Klusio19

Member

Registered: 2021-09-13

Posts: 7

How to make USB sound card hot-pluggable?

When I plug in my usb sound card (Soundblaster G3) to my machine with Gnome and pipewire after it is already booted, it doesn't get recognized or I should rather say loaded(?). By experimenting different things, I figured out, that I need to restart pipewire.service with 

systemctl restart --user pipewire.service

to make it available to gnome settings or pwvucontrol. Can I make it hot-pluggable so it gets instantly recognized?
If that helps, the sound card shows every time (without needing pipewire.service restart) for example in /proc/asound/cards or in /proc/asound/modules. When the card is plugged in before laptop is booted, it works too, since the pipewire.service starts as the system starts. I've tried adding

{ cmd = "load-module" args = "module-switch-on-connect" }

to pipewire-pulse.conf, but it doesn't change anything.

Last edited by Klusio19 (2025-04-05 10:30:31)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,508

Re: How to make USB sound card hot-pluggable?

That should be the default already unless you have a logic conflict between pipewire and pulseaudio, make sure pipewire-pulse is actually installed as well as wireplumber.

Should that not be sufficient, before the service restart what do you get from

sudo dmesg | grep snd
journalctl -b --user-unit pipewire --user-unit wireplumber --user-unit pipewire-pulse

Klusio19

Member

Registered: 2021-09-13

Posts: 7

Re: How to make USB sound card hot-pluggable?

Found out by accident that my problem has probably nothing to do with the pipewire/wireplumber: it's problem with USB splitter! (Unitek Y-3089)
When I plug in the USB card directely into one of the laptop's USB ports, it it recognized properly - hot plugging works. I can plug and unplug how many times I want, it always works.
However when I plug it into one of splitter's USB ports - it does't get recognized - I need to restart pipewire.service.
Moreover - after just that 1 time, when I plug USB card into USB splitter, it then doesn't get recognized even on direct laptop's USB port until again restarting pipewire.service.
Now that's interesting...