Arch Linux

bladpow

Member

Registered: 2025-04-30

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Headset "randomly" stops outputting sound

I’m running Arch Linux (kernel 6.14.4-arch1-1) with KDE Plasma and PulseAudio. On random occasions, most reliably when I click a new YouTube video in my borwser (firefox), my USB headset simply stops outputting any sound. The video itself hangs “loading,” and no other applications (e.g. Spotify) will play audio either.

In System Settings → Audio, my headset still shows up as the selected output device. When I click Test Sound, I get: Error trying to play a test sound. The system said: “Invalid state”

The only way to restore audio is to physically unplug and re-plug the USB cable, which works 70% of the time sometimes forcing multiple attempts only to loose audio later, again, and again.

Last edited by bladpow (2025-04-30 21:12:51)

bladpow

Member

Registered: 2025-04-30

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Headset "randomly" stops outputting sound

I see that I might have been a little too vague when explaining my issue originally, and it's partly because I didn't really know for sure what the issue was. But, I have done a little digging, and it seems (not 100% sure) that my browser, and other applications too probably, is "grabbing" my hardware, or that pulseaudio likely detects a change in available audio ports and automatically reroutes/disrupts the audio stream. I have done a lot of testing with pavucontrol and even commented out the "module-switch-on-port-available" in ~/.config/pulse/default.pa but it still happens. I can hear this click/dot sound when I open my browser, typical of a output device being unplugged but quite subtle. When this happens the sound is gone.

I hope, for my sake, that helps

Last edited by bladpow (2025-04-30 20:30:52)

bladpow

Member

Registered: 2025-04-30

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Headset "randomly" stops outputting sound

I have good and bad news. After spending many hours troubleshooting, I gave up on trying to resolve the issue under PulseAudio and decided to switch my audio server to PipeWire instead. That worked and my USB headset is now stable, audio routing is reliable, and the issue no longer occurs. So that's the good news.

The bad news is that I still don’t have a definitive root cause or fix for the original porblem under PulseAudio, so unfortunately I don’t have a real solution to offer anyone else facing this. If you're stuck on a similar issue, switching to PipeWire might be your best option.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,157

Re: [SOLVED] Headset "randomly" stops outputting sound

The randomness of the issue suggests to me you had wireplumber installed and running. wireplumber and pulseaudio will actively conflict in their default setup because depending on which of the two grabs the pulse commands that are sent first they won't have an effect (since wireplumber wants to talk to pipewire-pulse, which isn't running). You can make them coexist by configuring wireplumber to not try and take over audio: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/WirePl … ntegration