Hello,
For some reason minecraft doesn’t show as an application in playback section of pavucontrol. I do have sound but I can’t select audio output for it since it’s not listed. I’m fairly sure java used to be listed there, and now it’s gone and I can’t figure out what I’ve done. I don’t understand how I can have sound in an app and not see it in playback.
As a side effect, in KDE you can normally mute apps in task manager with the little sound icon on them, but that icon doesn’t exist for minecraft.
Thanks in advance !
Jin
I am also having this issue after configuring pipewire. Everything else seems to work. Anyone got a fix?
The Explanation:
Basically, Pipewire runs as both a JACK server and a PulseAudio server. That’s good and all, but openAL (Minecraft’s sound engine) connects to JACK by default. This works fine for playing audio, but pavucontrol is a PulseAudio application, meaning it doesn’t see what’s connected to the JACK part of Pipewire.
The Solution:
Create or edit ~/.alsoftrc and add the following lines:
[general]
drivers = pulse
I don’t want to necrobump this but I think this may be helpful to someone as this turned out to be a slightly prickly issue for me!
Version of OpenAL prior to version 1.22 prioritised the JACK output backend. JACK seems officially to support device enumeration although for me it doesn’t work well. The result of this being that I was unable to find a way to specify the desired JACK output device.
My solution was to run alsoft-config and (under Backends > General set “Priority Backends:” to “PipeWire” and set “Disabled Backends:” to “JACK”. This appears to have forced OpenAL to use the PipeWire back-end and has resolved the issue. Interestingly, if I fire up pavucontrol I can once again see “java” as a playback stream and select the output device!
I hope this is useful to someone!