Arch Linux

akhlaghi

Member

Registered: 2018-09-20

Posts: 8

[SOLVED] Audio not available in GNOME

It is now one day that my GNOME GUI doesn't recognize my audio device (probably after a 'pacman -Syu' that I did the night before). I mean that I don't have any scroll-bar to specify the output sound level and when I go to the GNOME settings, and go into the "Sound" settings, there is nothing to select in the "Output Device" and "Input Device"!

However, when I run 'lspci', I see that my Audio device is recognized (it is a Dell Vostro 7590 laptop):

$ lspci | grep audio
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS (rev 10)

I am not familiar with the sound-related substructure in ArchLinux to post more information (P.S.). Please let me know what command to run (to further clarify the issue) and I'll post the output. Thanks a lot in advance.

P.S. I did try to start with the https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sound_system Wiki page to learn more and try to troubleshoot my problem, but it was too general and directed me to too specific pages. So after several hours of going through the pages, I couldn't identify the problem to be able to give better information here.

Last edited by akhlaghi (2021-03-20 16:13:44)

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: [SOLVED] Audio not available in GNOME

Have you rebooted since the last update? Arch is migrating from PulseAudio to PipeWire. So if that last update e.g. pulled in pipewire-pulse you should reboot.

LWN had a long article about PipeWire earlier this month: https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/

And after you have migrated to PW, you probably need to update your mixer settings and change the device name. Or at least I had to do that in https://archlinux.org/packages/communit … olumeicon/.

akhlaghi

Member

Registered: 2018-09-20

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Audio not available in GNOME

Thank you for the link and explanations. PipeWire does indeed seem interesting! I'd really like to learn the foundations on Audio in Linux later!

Indeed, I rebooted after the system upgrade. I also tried installing Volumeicon, but that didn't change any thing (see P.S.)

This is the version of my Pipewire:

$ pipewire --version
pipewire
Compiled with libpipewire 0.3.24
Linked with libpipewire 0.3.24

Having a look at the PipeWire wiki on ArchLinux, I came up with this troubleshooting item: No devices detected after PipeWire update and reboot (git / >=0.3.23) which seems to fit my version. So I tried to follow its instructions:

The pipewire-media-session.service is active on my system but has failed:

$ systemctl --user status pipewire-media-session.service
● pipewire-media-session.service - Multimedia Service Session Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire-media-session.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2021-03-20 15:29:45 WET; 12min ago
    Process: 1549 ExecStart=/usr/bin/pipewire-media-session (code=exited, status=161)
   Main PID: 1549 (code=exited, status=161)

Mar 20 15:29:45 user systemd[1097]: pipewire-media-session.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Mar 20 15:29:45 user systemd[1097]: Stopped Multimedia Service Session Manager.
Mar 20 15:29:45 user systemd[1097]: pipewire-media-session.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Mar 20 15:29:45 user systemd[1097]: pipewire-media-session.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Mar 20 15:29:45 user systemd[1097]: Failed to start Multimedia Service Session Manager.

I also checked the status of the general PipeWire service and that seems to be running:

$ systemctl --user status pipewire.service
● pipewire.service - Multimedia Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pipewire.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Sat 2021-03-20 15:29:44 WET; 14min ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire.socket
   Main PID: 1464 (pipewire)
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire.service
             └─1464 /usr/bin/pipewire

Mar 20 15:29:44 user systemd[1097]: Started Multimedia Service.

I also had a look in '/etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf', and noticed that the '/usr/bin/pipewire-media-session" = { args = "" }' line is indeed commented.

So it seems that the failed 'pipewire-media-session.service'  is the culprit. Do you have any recommendations on how to debug this and find the cause of the failure?

P.S. The "Upstream URL" of volumeicon (https://softwarebakery.com/maato/volumeicon.html) returns a 404 error (Not found)

akhlaghi

Member

Registered: 2018-09-20

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Audio not available in GNOME

I noticed that 'pipewire-media-session.service' contains the executed command, so I ran it separately, this is the error message:

$ /usr/bin/pipewire-media-session
[E][000001194.620618][core.c:384 core_new()] core 0x5570042c2250: can't find protocol 'PipeWire:Protocol:Native': Operation not supported
[E][000001194.620708][media-session.c:2059 start_session()] can't start monitor: Operation not supported

Searching the error message, I came across this issue: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=264463, which also fixed my problem:

I just had to replace the '.pacnew' files for '/etc/pipewire/media-session.d/media-session.conf':

cd /etc/pipewire/media-session.d/
mv media-session.conf media-session.conf.old
mv media-session.conf.pacnew media-session.conf

Then I ran 'systemctl --user start pipewire-media-session.service' and GNOME showed the volume slider at the top-right of the window (near the wifi sign, where it always was before). After a restart the audio worked automatically and no manual intervention was necessary :-). Thanks again for the pointers.

Last edited by akhlaghi (2021-03-20 16:17:12)