Hi everyone,
For a few day now (not sure when it started anymore; let’s say around the 19th or 20th of October at the soonest), I have had issues with the audio output of my laptop.
I think that it’s software -related, because it happens only when I use Manjaro, and not when I use Windows (I have both as dual boot on my laptop).
Description of the issue
The “normal” audio output does not work anymore: no sound comes out of the speaker (but things work when I use my bluetooth -connected headset). At least some softwares which generate audio output (ex: music player) do “think” that audio output is emitted, because they display a visual activity correlated to the sound?
By fiddling around in the “Sound” settings, sometimes I’m able to make it work again, by switching between the default configuration for the input, and another configuration which can use the microphone of a headset I think, and then back again (cf red rectangle in the following image). It does not always work, or not right away. When I use the “Test the speaker” functionality of the “Sound” settings (cf yellow rectangle in the following image), sometimes I see a visual indicator (fluctuating green bar (cf green rectangle in the following image)) which correlates with the frequency and intensity of the sound emitted during the test, and sometimes not. And this, whether soud is actually emitted (and heard by me) or not. See all this on this image:
https://paste.pics/ce83baab887f72ad8fc33faa4c0dffec
That said, even when I succeed in seemingly “fixing the issue” with that, the issue always come back at one point or another. It’s possible that what triggers it is when an app / a software tries to emit sound (ex: when I get a Discord notification, for instance; or when I try to play a sound with the music player?).
Rebooting the computer does not fix the issue: if the issue was present before I rebooted, then it’s still there after the reboot.
Given the current state of my investigation, notably regarding what I can do with the “Sound” settings section, I assume that the issue is linked, or at least is somewhat affected by, some configuration of the system in charge of dealing with audio outputs and inputs.
What I tried + Additional pieces of info
I searched over Google for possible similar issues and associated fixes, but I have not really found anything readily useful up until now.
I remember seeing messages where people told others to investigate things related to pulseaudio and pipewire, but when I tried to replicate some commands, I realized that a priori pulseaudio is not even installed on my Manjaro instance.
Anyway, here are some pieces of info regarding my system. I have gathered those info specifically when the issue was ongoing.
The Audio section of the output of the inxi -Fazy command:
Audio:
Device-1: Intel Meteor Lake-P HD Audio vendor: ASUSTeK
driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-mtl
alternate: snd_hda_intel,snd_sof_pci_intel_mtl bus-ID: 0000:00:1f.3
chip-ID: 8086:7e28 class-ID: 0401
API: ALSA v: k6.6.54-2-MANJARO status: kernel-api with: aoss
type: oss-emulator tools: alsactl,alsamixer,amixer
Server-1: JACK v: 1.9.22 status: off tools: N/A
Server-2: PipeWire v: 1.2.5 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse
status: active 2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin
tools: pactl,pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl
The output of the pipewire-pulse command:
[W][81403.612143] mod.protocol-pulse | [ server.c: 612 start_unix_server()] server 0x55cd0b8571a0: socket '/run/user/1000/pulse/native' is in use
[W][81403.612304] mod.protocol-pulse | [ server.c: 1044 servers_create_and_start()] pulse-server 0x55cd0b84eaa0: failed to start server on 'unix:/run/user/1000/pulse/native': Adresse déjà utilisée
[E][81403.612323] mod.protocol-pulse | [ pulse-server.c: 5545 pw_protocol_pulse_new()] 0x55cd0b84eaa0: no servers could be started: Adresse déjà utilisée
[E][81403.612433] pw.conf | [ conf.c: 603 load_module()] 0x55cd0b8221b0: could not load mandatory module "libpipewire-module-protocol-pulse": Adresse déjà utilisée
[E][81403.613052] default | [ pipewire.c: 124 main()] failed to create context: Adresse déjà utilisée
Some of this output is written in French. It basically says that “addresses are already in use”.
I also ran the command systemctl --user status pipewire.service, probably following what I read up somewhere following a Google search, which gave the following result:
https://paste.pics/6d2729d81bece93ca3dcc2d63d8550a0
The lines in yellow basically complain that there the “pipe is broken”, or something like that.
I’m not sure which other commands I could use to provide you with you more data. Please tell me which other ones I should use, if any.
And that’s it for now I think. Would anyone here know what this is about, and what I should do in order to fix this, please? Don’t hesitate to ask me for any additional piece of information.