Audio not working after recent update

Support Sound
1

After the latest update, videos wouldn’t play and testing the sound device in the sound settings would prompt errors in the journal, saying that the audio sink was suspended:

Mär 18 20:21:19 Empy2023 pulseaudio[1571]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mär 18 20:21:19 Empy2023 pulseaudio[1571]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mär 18 20:21:19 Empy2023 pulseaudio[1571]: Failed to create sink input: sink is suspended.
Mär 18 20:21:19 Empy2023 gnome-control-c[2266]: Failed to play sound: Invalid state

Re-plugging my USB sound card worked, but only for a short time.

Finally, this seems to work for me:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/114602/pulseaudio-sink-always-suspended

It seems that PulseAudio suspends idle sound devices but can’t re-activate them.

2 Likes
2

Which specifically?

There are three (3) answers in that StackExchange topic.

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i try to first answer… changing suspend-to-idle on /etc/pulse/default.pa … restart and worked for me…

1 Like
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Yes, sorry about that. It was an unnerving two hours hunting this one down. I meant the first answer, which describes how to solve the problem by disabling suspend-to-idle by commenting out the line

load-module module-suspend-on-idle

in the file /etc/pulse/default.pa with a leading #. Instead of restarting the service I just rebooted my system.

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5

I strongly suspect that pipewire and pulseaudio are running at the same time. If pipewire puts the sound to sleep, pulseaudio will not be able to wake it up, at the same time pulseaudio blocks pipewire from waking up the audio device.

Result: it won’t wake up.

Sure your solution helps, but doubt it solves the core problem. Decide: pipewire or pulseaudio. Can you share that to confirm?

inxi -Azy
1 Like
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You seem to be correct:

Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Cannon Lake PCH cAVS driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 31 HDMI/DP Audio
    driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-3: ASUSTek Xonar U7 MKII driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid
    type: USB
  API: ALSA v: k6.12.19-1-MANJARO status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.1 status: active
  Server-2: PulseAudio v: 17.0-43-g3e2bb status: active

pipewire seems to have been installed for a while, but the yesterday update installed pipewire-audio.

I seem not to be able to remove either of them without breaking dependencies, though.

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At least disable and mask it:

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user disable pulseaudio.service
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio.service

If you are not familiar with solving dependencies.

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Well, I’ve had some time now and I think I managed to resolve them. At least the PulseAudio service is gone and everything seems to work for now. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.

Transaction history for reference:

[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] installed manjaro-pipewire (20231009-1)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] installed pipewire-pulse (1:1.4.1-0)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] installed pipewire-alsa (1:1.4.1-0)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] removed pulseaudio-alsa (1:1.2.12-4)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] removed pulseaudio (17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] removed pulseaudio-bluetooth (17.0+r43+g3e2bb8a1e-1)
[2025-03-19T11:56:03+0100] [ALPM] removed manjaro-pulse (20240817-1)

Am I correct in assuming that to resolve dependencies one has to add replacements in the same transaction?

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A post was split to a new topic: Audio not working after a recent update

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This was my solution for the same problem!

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A post was split to a new topic: Audio not working after update #2

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