Messed up with pulse-audio settings on Pipewire and now my mic capture playback…Need to return built-in mic as a single source
I am searching for solution 3 days and nothing. My system Pulse-audio on Pipewire.
I opened Audacity and set recording device as “pulse”
I opened pavucontrol and chose recording as “monitor”
After rebooting I got 2 sources 1) monitor-output 2) mic -which is not recognized in browsers. In audacity/OBS it plays like mic+monitor-playback at the same time
I have wireplumber but all scripts I wrote it does not execute, I tried to mute source with pactls - nothing works for me. Please help. You are my last option.
People here who could help would need to know some things.
one would be what you have changed - what you did and why
the next would be details about your scripts - what you think they ought to achieve, what they look like and where you put them …
To start over you might need to have to delete audacity configs in ~/.config/…
I, for one, am not clear, don’t have an understanding of what the actual problem is.
sure. I wanted to record a music from youtube) So I did. Audacity recorded it. But after that I cannot return my built-in mic as a single source. I even reinstalled audacity (i notced that Audacity has alsa-plugin to record playback) but it did not help monitor as a source is still there
reinstalling an application will not ever, never ever, change anything in your $HOME - in your user configuration.
You would need to remove that “by hand” to go back to the default state.
changing recording source in pavucontrol might have set the sink monitor as default source instead of microphone source
Please post more information about pipewire-pulse sources
pactl list sources short; pactl get-default-source
OBS-Studio default settings allows user to record desktop audio and microphone at the same time, but Audacity can usually record from one audio source only, unless audio card is using pro-audio profile (pipewire-jack)
Please edit your topic title to be clear and concise about the problem you’re having as well as post your system information. All the details are included in the following:
This is something I do myself, as I rarely keep detailed notes when I’m trying to fix something…
I rely on snapshots and backups much more. I would first browse my backup folder (fresh incremental back-up every 4 hours) and copy back my original Audacity config.
if changes are wider, then I could restore the whole lot - and if it’s a system issue, I can restore a snapshot.
Failing that, possibly brute force:
# brute force troubleshooting...
mv ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# logout and log back in again to force plasma to recreate the folder with default settings
dolphin --split ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# copy back half of the BORKED folder contents at a time and relog to see if issue returns
# if it does, then delete the folder again, relog, and only copy half of that previous half
# repeat until the culprit is found, then finally, copy back everything BUT that culprit bit
To establish it’s a USER vs SYSTEM error, you can create a new USER and make sure everything works in a fresh account (though in this case, you’re confident you borked it in some setting or script or something).
Moving On:
Be sure to set snapshots and backups - back-in-time is my poison, and it creates an incremental backup of my HOME contents every 4 hours and keeps copies for a few hours, few days, week, month.
Then snapshots I donate 33% of my 250GiB system drive for disaster recovery.
The most important is backups, as they make reinstalling less painful and store most of the important things that would take months to recover.
Did you also logout, enter a TTY and remove/rename the ~/.cache directory, and reboot? Otherwise, if settings are currently in use any changes may not be obvious.
Please provide your system information as described (below) which will allow others to identify possible contributors, and edit the topic title as previously instructed.
Regards.
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I removed all conf files and cache of Audacity after de-instalation - but monitor is still in sources in pavucontrol - so it looks like Audacity plugin effected the whole system and it is not the one that cause the problem
As far as I know there is no simple way to disable creation of alsa-output.*.monitor sources, aside from changing the card profile to input only that also disables the output sink for audio playback
resetting wireplumber to default did not help. It looks like wireplumber cannot forbid the particular source. Can I set a rule in user configuration in ~/.config/pipewire/…. to forbid particular source? or edit pulse-audio configuration file? I tried to unload some modules but it did not work as well. So I think the problem in configuration in pulse-audio. But where to set the rules and how to set them correctly?
Since there is no solution how to recover built-in mic I will use external USB mic for recording and chatting and monitor-playback to record music in Audacity from youtube) Cannot miss such great opportunity) If i receive a lemon - i will do a lemonade Thank you everyone for your help. I appreciate it so much. I learned a lot from your answers)
Topic closed without a solution. @devops2320 – If you wish to add more pertinent information at a later time, please ask a Moderation staff member to re-open the topic, at their discretion.
As far as I know there is no simple, known solution for disabling a sink monitor in pipewire-pulse (or pulseaudio) and nobody seems to have asked the project maintainers about this
Hardware sink or source nodes can be disabled in WirePlumber (similar to changing card profiles in pavucontrol GUI) - ArchWiki - WirePlumber - Disable a device/node
BUT the sink monitor source does not have a node to disable (it is created automatically to allow recording from the sink output)
It might be possible to change low-level configuration of PipeWire using coppwr-bin AUR but it is not recommended
The PipeWire lowlevel API is a loose collection of objects, properties and parameters that are combined into a coherent use case by the Audio Toolkit in use (JACK/PulseAudio). So any GUI without a concrete use case would not make much sense.
That said, there are cli tools to configure and manipulate every aspect of PipeWire
There are a few possible solutions for using built-in microphone source instead of the sink monitor
user could change the recording source in the dropdown menu in pavucontrolRecording tab pavucontrol --tab=2 (to revert change of Audacity recording source in OP)
OR use pactl or pw-metadata to move the source-output stream:
at their disposal – instead, please help others to make informed suggestions based on information you provide.
Thank you everyone for your help. I appreciate it so much. I learned a lot from your answers)