Not getting any sound through pulseaudio and paplay

[zxuiji]

I found out earlier that pulseaudio had been removed because of an unrelated issue teaching me how to reinstall apps by force and in the process of trying that same method on pulseaudio the terminal said there was no such package (so I told it to install it again instead). After that I tried manually activating pulseaudio to see if I could finally control my volume. paplay activated as intended but I had no sound coming from it, so I rebooted thinking that was all that was needed, nope need something else too as no matter what I try I cannot get that sound from paplay. The browser was playing audio just fine prior to the reboot, though now I’m can’t seem to get a YT vid playing to test whether it still works, may be related to installing pulseaudio. Was there a recent update that removed pulseaudio and if so why? More importantly how do I get my sound back from paplay and pulseaudio?

Edit: just tried a twitch stream instead, video refuses to play unless it’s muted so something broke for sure

[zxuiji]

To mark this as solved I’m putting this in a reply. Figured maybe pipewire was installed so I looked up pipewire and then pipewire-pulse after seeing it was installed. was expecting the package to be something like pipewire-pulseaudio but nope, pipewire-pulse turned out to be exactly what I wanted. Installing it instead resolved the audio issues, allowing me to change it properly (with sound effects to help me hear how loud it is) and got youtube to play it’s video. presumably fixed twitch too

[soundofthunder]

A little clarity for passers-by:

Installing manjaro-pulse will prompt to disable pipewire and enable pulseaudio; agree to the prompt when you see it.

sudo pacman -S manjaro-pulse

As I understand it, pipewire cannot be completely removed as it’s a hard dependency – disable it instead by installing manjaro-pulse which is designed to conflict and prompt to install/enable pulseaudio.

[nikgnomic]

manjaro-pulse meta package installs pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa and pulseaudio-bluetooth to replace meta package manjaro-pipewire and pipewire-pulse audio server

$ pamac info manjaro-pulse

Name                  : manjaro-pulse
Version               : 20240817-1
Description           : Manjaro meta package for complete PulseAudio support

Depends On            : pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa pulseaudio-bluetooth
Optional Dependencies : paprefs: Configuration dialog
                        pasystray: system tray application
                        pavucontrol: A GTK volume control tool [Installed]
                        pavucontrol-qt: A Qt volume control tool
                        pulseaudio-equalizer: Graphical equalizer
                        pulseaudio-equalizer-ladspa: A 15-band equalizer
                        pulseaudio-jack: Jack support [Installed]
                        pulseaudio-lirc: IR (lirc) support
                        pulseaudio-rtp: RTP and RAOP support
                        pulseaudio-zeroconf: Zeroconf support

Conflicts With        : manjaro-pipewire pipewire-jack pipewire-pulse pipewire-v4l2 pipewire-x11-bell pipewire-zeroconf

pipewire and wireplumber are not removed, but they are is not needed for Xfce and can be removed from some Xfce systems, but pipewire might be required by some applications:

$ pamac remove pipewire
Preparing...
Checking dependencies...
Error: Failed to prepare transaction:
could not satisfy dependencies:
- removing pipewire breaks dependency 'pipewire' required by obs-studio

If pipewire cannot be removed the systemd units can be masked:

systemctl --user mask pipewire.service; systemctl --user mask pipewire.socket