[SOLVED] PipeWire (and now also ALSA) setup

Message

sicr0 · Post by **sicr0** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 3:59 am

I recently installed Gentoo. I never installed an audio system myself and decided to go for PipeWire.
I have selected "no-multilib" profile and didn't installed neither ALSA nor PulseAudio since the Wiki didn't said it was necessary for running PipeWire.
I selected the appropriate kernel modules and added the "pulseaudio" USE flag. After emerging @world, and adding to ".config/sway/config" the line needed to start PipeWire I rebooted but nothing changed.
Can someone help me fix this?

Post by **pietinger** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 7:11 am

PipeWire - like PulseAudio also - needs low-level audio interface ALSA.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ALSA

fpemud · Post by **fpemud** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 8:52 am

You can install media-sound/helvum::guru, using this tool you can see all the source, sink and connections between them.
It'll be very clear to see what pipewire and its sesson manager (for example media-video/wireplumber) has done for you.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/helvum

I also have some questions which maybe I can ask in this thread too:
Pipewire runs as a user service, then how does it access devices which are owned by root?
What's the behavior when multiple pipewire instance are running together (like in multiseat system)? Does each seat must have its own sound card?

sicr0 · Post by **sicr0** » Wed Apr 13, 2022 6:48 pm

I tried following the ALSA Gentoo guide, but it still doesn't work.
I added the "alsa" USE flag and re-emeregd @world, I activated the necessary Kernel modules, recompiled, and emerged "media-libs/alsa-lib". After doing so I activated the process with rc-service, checked that I was unmuted with alsamixer and then ran spaker-test, but without receiving no sound output. How could I debug this to get this to work. I'm really lost when regarding audio and media systems.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Thu Apr 14, 2022 3:45 am

The output of emerge --info would answer a lot of questions. Just paste here in between the Code tags.

Post by **pietinger** » Thu Apr 14, 2022 11:46 am

What @figueroa said and also:

Read this: viewtopic-p-6195854.html#6195854

Do a

Code: Select all

lspci | grep Audio

You will see one or two lines. Then do a

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lspci -vv

and give us only the blocks from these one or two lines.
Check if "alsamixer" also recognizes this.
We also need

Code: Select all

dmesg | grep snd

Do you have a /etc/asound.conf ? If yes, we need the content of it.

Maybe it is only a little missing /etc/asound.conf ...