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mehdi

Member

Registered: 2016-10-05

Posts: 15

[SOLVED] Pipewire/wireplumber: audio is locked by certain programs

Hello there,

I am using pipewire/wireplumber. I have noticed an error over the previous months and would appreciate your input.

It appears that some programs like Steam "lock" the audio device and as long as they are running other programs can't use the device. For example if I play musing with mplayer while Steam is running I get "audio device is stuck!" error. Or "[AO OSS] audio_setup: Can't open audio device /dev/dsp: No such file or directory".

Interestingly, if I start playing music with mplayer and then start Steam, steam would not be able to capture the device and there would be no sound in any game. If while running steam I "pause" the music, it will loose the device and won't be able to capture it anymore, even if I close steam. Until I manually run "systemd --user restart wireplumber.service". Then it works again.

Moreover, I use multiple users and when I switch from one user to the other user similar locking issues happen and I have to restart wireplumber to get the sound work again under the new user account.

I'm confused as I was under the impression that with pipewire and wireplumber share the audio device between many applications and I don't understand the "locking" that is apparently happening here.

Could someone please point me into the right direction to get to the root cause and solve this issue?

Cheers and thanks in advance.

Update: the problem was solved by setting the profile of my loudspeaker to "Analog Stereo Output" instead of "Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output". I don't know why, but it resolved the issue. Thanks for your time.

Last edited by mehdi (2023-04-17 21:19:44)

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,277

Re: [SOLVED] Pipewire/wireplumber: audio is locked by certain programs

If you haven't done so, you'll have to install at least pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse so all applications will play sound with pipewire.

Last edited by progandy (2023-04-09 10:39:57)

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mehdi

Member

Registered: 2016-10-05

Posts: 15

Re: [SOLVED] Pipewire/wireplumber: audio is locked by certain programs

Both those packages are present on my system. Does my DE could have anything to do with that? I use both KDE (with SDDM) and Sway.