Arch Linux

RichiePratt

Member

Registered: 2024-09-12

Posts: 3

[Solved] Pipewire sporadically downgrades settings

Hi, I am a small streamer and a semi-pro audio engineer/musician. I am not afraid of the command line, but I am not very good at troubleshooting stuff like this. I have a Rodecaster Pro 2 that I use for livestreaming, and while it was a little bumpy getting it to work with Linux, once I had it figured out, it worked well and was pretty much set and forgot about.

Recently, I've been having issues with Pipewire/Pavucontrol randomly switching my interface setting from "Pro Audio" to "Analog Stereo Duplex" and this is causing a lot of breakage. This happens on average at least once every 2 hours. I know when it happens as it causes audio to be routed through the wrong channel and it is much louder than it should be, and I also see the audio interface flash on the screen briefly.

On OBS, this causes my audio routing to completely break and I have to manually reroute everything with Qpwgraph. In addition it spawns about 15 nodes each time which increasingly makes Qpwgraph harder and more tedious to parse. My only alternative that works is closing and reopening OBS but I cannot do that during a livestream, and that is the only time I use OBS.

When I am working with audio, it forces me to completely halt my workflow and creative process for a few minutes which is an absolute deal breaker.

I'm seriously at my wit's end. It is making me consider dual booting Windows which I would really rather not do as it has not touched my system since I built it in 2019. My system has been working flawlessly for years through multiple physical upgrades, and this is the first time I've experienced a debilitating bug like this. The only thing I can imagine is that a recent system upgrade broke a key dependency and is causing a panic. If I could make the appropriate config file that controls my interface being set to "pro audio" immutable, I figure that would be a patchwork solution, but I cannot figure out what or if that file exists.

Any help is appreciated.

Last edited by RichiePratt (2024-09-18 01:57:40)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,860

Re: [Solved] Pipewire sporadically downgrades settings

When was "recently"? wireplumber has adjusted it's profile loading logic in the latest release, a first step you should try is removing it's cache that can sometimes cause issues, remove ~/.local/state/wireplumber and reboot. If that didn't fix it, try downgrading wireplumber to 0.5.5

RichiePratt

Member

Registered: 2024-09-12

Posts: 3

Re: [Solved] Pipewire sporadically downgrades settings

When was "recently"? wireplumber has adjusted it's profile loading logic in the latest release, a first step you should try is removing it's cache that can sometimes cause issues, remove ~/.local/state/wireplumber and reboot. If that didn't fix it, try downgrading wireplumber to 0.5.5

Thank you so much for the quick reply.

Flushing the local wireplumber cache unfortunately did not resolve my situation, but downgrading back to 5.5 did. No issues for 5 days. For my issue and potentially any issues similar to it, the problem seems to be in wireplumber 5.6-1. I'll just keep an eye out to see if 5.7 will have similar issues and update my system less frequently in the meantime. For now, I'm marking my post as solved