The last two upgrades have broken my audio setup.
First the options for Network Server and Network Access in paprefs were greyed out and my sinks disappeared after upgrading to bookworm. I just had to create a link to an existing file and it was working again but, it’s weird that it was needed in the first place. Pretty sure it has something to do with the change from pulseaudio to pipewire but I’m not very up to date on that subject and I just want to have my current setup to continue working.
Then yesterday I just launch a simple apt-get upgrade and after rebooting my sinks disappeared again. The network options in paprefs were still available, but changing them did nothing. I had to create the file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/10-gsettings.conf and stuff it with “pulse.cmd = [ { cmd = “load-module” args = “module-gsettings” flags = [ “nofail” ] } ]” in order to have my sinks back.
I know it’s not only a Debian thing, as I can see this happening to people on Arch forums, but as Debian is supposed to be the “stable” one, I find it amusing that a simple upgrade can break your sound.
The changes to linux audio lately are a bit of a mess. Wireplumber completely changed their config format with 5.0 and it just stopped launching if you had v4 configs.
I do appreciate that we’re not stuck with pulseaudio anymore though so I really shouldn’t complain.
Mint is still on pulse, but thankfully there was someone out there that had a nice script that switches you to pipewire and easy effects so I did that.
(I tried to find that script again but can’t find it. Pretty sure it was on a forum somewhere if anyone needs to find it.)
Found it: https://github.com/Rigel2118/pipewire-installation-kit-for-linuxmint
Thanks to pipewire’s pulseaudio emulation transitioning from one to the other is effectively seamless. Just install the pipewire pulseaudio package (it’s tiny) after installing the rest of pipewire and apps that depend on pulse just work.
