Arch Linux

dboxcaptain

Member

Registered: 2025-07-15

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Audio cuts out system-wide when starting Steam game

Hey all, new Arch user here. Apologies if this has already been asked.

I recently installed Steam by following the wiki. I am currently using nvidia proprietary drivers v575 and pipewire v1.4.6.
When I start a game, things seem to work as expected graphically, but the audio cuts out soon after starting the application (sometimes immediately). When this happens, no audio on the entire system works until the game is closed. When scanning `journalctl`, the only clue I see is the following error:

Jul 14 23:13:02 zarch pipewire[2374]: spa.alsa: hw:sofhdadspp: (375 suppressed) snd_pcm_avail after recover: Broken pipe

I browsed through the wiki for troubleshooting and tried installing some lib32 version of pipewire libraries to no avail. There doesn't seem to be game-specific Wiki pages. The closest thing I came across was a legitimate bug in version 1.4.3, but that is supposedly fixed as of 1.4.4. Here's the forum post.

I'm unsure of how best to diagnose and solve it from this point. Any help would be appreciated!

Last edited by dboxcaptain (2025-07-16 01:43:24)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,960

Re: [SOLVED] Audio cuts out system-wide when starting Steam game

What game? lib32-libpulse and lib32-libpipewire installed? Proton or native? Log of said game when launched from terminal? Generally speaking such a stall could come from to conservative buffers set which you could try and increase https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire … ze-quantum

dboxcaptain

Member

Registered: 2025-07-15

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Audio cuts out system-wide when starting Steam game

Okay, good news! Increasing the buffer size worked. I set mine to 512 based on somebody's post from the OpenSUSE forums. I wouldn't have been able to find that without the heads up on the buffer, so thanks for the tip.

For future forum crawlers, I did in fact already have lib32-libpulse and lib32-libpipewire installed. Here's all of the packages I have currently:

pacman -Q | grep -E "pipewire|pulse|alsa|wire"
alsa-card-profiles 1:1.4.6-1
alsa-firmware 1.2.4-4
alsa-lib 1.2.14-1
alsa-plugins 1:1.2.12-4
alsa-topology-conf 1.2.5.1-4
alsa-ucm-conf 1.2.14-2
alsa-utils 1.2.14-1
gst-plugin-pipewire 1:1.4.6-1
lib32-alsa-lib 1.2.14-1
lib32-alsa-plugins 1.2.12-1
lib32-libpipewire 1:1.4.6-1
lib32-libpulse 17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1
lib32-pipewire 1:1.4.6-1
libpipewire 1:1.4.6-1
libpulse 17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1
libwireplumber 0.5.10-1
pipewire 1:1.4.6-1
pipewire-audio 1:1.4.6-1
pipewire-pulse 1:1.4.6-1
pipewire-session-manager 1:1.4.6-1
pulse-native-provider 1:1.4.6-1
wireplumber 0.5.10-1

I copied the default pipewire config from /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire.conf to /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf, and set default.clock.min-quantum, default.clock.max-quantum, and default.clock.quantum all to 512. Some of that may have been redundant, but it seems to be working.