linuxmemes

Oh god, I had such weird issues with audio on my manjaro desktop with pulseaudio ... Never touched anything related to sound on that system again, out of fear everything would break down again. I didn't switch to pipewire until years later.

Well, I have this weird issue when playing Fallout 76 through Steam on Ubuntu 24.04.

If I use my Bluetooth headphones to play, journalctl shows periodic streams of pipewire errors (not near my laptop or I would paste the errors), and after one or two hours audio will become silent. I can recover stopping the game, reconnecting the headphones, and starting the game.

It seems like a problem with the game, as other games, including the other Fallouts, work flawlessly. Still shouldn’t overwhelm pipewire IMO.

TBH the last audio quirk I had on Linux was two years ago, it wouldn’t remember the volume of my headphones, and it was solved on its own after an update.

Just use a decently recent distro or update to pipewire (and recent kernel). Pulseaudio is basically not where the good things are done anymore. It's been more than a year or 2 already that the sony phones have microphone working properly.

It is a hard moving bunch of pieces that needed to be in place. The user libraries (pulseaudio or pipewire) the bluez stack and the kernel. For a while things were almost working on the first parts but there were problems on the kernel side then the kernel received patches and it finally was able to support the good audio codec.

The answer is PipeWire. It's a drop-in replacement for PulseAudio that works.

once an update took away all of my sound devices in mint. had to roll back a few times and update a few packages at a time to find which freedesktop update broke it, then blacklisted it. that was the only time mint broke anything by itself.

I manually disabled HSP in pulseaudio. I'd rather use an external mic than subject myself to the atrocious audio quality of HSP.

I once tried to uninstall every package to do with Wine but sudo apt remove wine* wrecked the system past the point a high schooler could recover it

I have no idea why Pulse is so bad. During my last foray into Linux, I created a shortcut for killing and restarting Pulse and pinned it to the dock. I also replaced all my game shortcuts with scripts that reinitialized pulse, then ran the game, then reinitialized pulse again when the game was closed.

Like, yeah. When you have everything working as it should, Linux runs smoothly and there are no more complications. But it's a real pain in the ass that initial configuration, especially for newbies like me a couple of years ago.

Thank you for pointing that out! Exactly the same for me

You can fix this issue if you right-click the sound icon down in the corner of your screen and choose "sounds" from the list. Then in the first tab in the window that opens up you can find and disable the monitor as a sound device from being used and defaulted to at random on startup.

Gotta distrohop more my dude. Reinstall your OS every week.

I think a netbook I had in 2014 was the last time I had any audio problems.

Has c/linuxmemes become c/excusestokeepusingwindows?

Japan is in the 23th century already

Bitwig Studio is what finally allowed me to fully switch to Linux instead of keeping a Mac just for using Ableton Live.