I am not an expert. I only went through change to pipewire yesterday.
If you mask something it will not run and you will not be able to start it.
First I removed pulseaudio. It informed about dependencies so first I removed them. Command
sudo pacman -Rns pulseaudio
will first display those dependencies
Then I installed:
pamac search -i 'pipewire|pulseaudio'
pipewire-pulse 1:0.3.23-1 extra
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - PulseAudio replacement
pipewire-media-session 1:0.3.23-1 extra
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - Session manager
pipewire-jack 1:0.3.23-1 extra
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - JACK support
pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.23-1 extra
Low-latency audio/video router and processor - ALSA configuration
pipewire 1:0.3.23-1 extra
Low-latency audio/video router and processor
manjaro-pipewire 20210109-1 community
Meta package for pipewire support.
libpipewire02 0.2.7-1 extra
User space API to deal with multimedia pipelines (0.2)
lib32-libpulse 14.2-2 multilib
A featureful, general-purpose sound server (32-bit client libraries)
and pipewire-media-session and pulse-pa
I unmasked, enabled and started all related services and sockets
systemctl --user list-unit-files | grep -E 'pulseaudio|pipewire'
pipewire-media-session.service enabled enabled
pipewire-pulse.service enabled enabled
pipewire.service enabled enabled
pipewire-pulse.socket enabled enabled
pipewire.socket enabled enabled
You do it like this, for example
systemctl --user unmask pipewire.service
systemctl --user enable pipewire.service --now
systemctl --user start pipewire.service --now
Then I checked for errors:
systemctl --user status pipewire*
Also check different sound sources and applications like, mp3 or video from disk from audacious and youtube Firefox. In Audacious you have options: output alsa or pulseaudio. I have set pulseaudio because it works with pipewire-pulse I think.
Also check your system settings
https://forum.manjaro.org/uploads/default/original/3X/e/3/e304815b9751a867dddca95c2a3c400cd037c593.png
I also get this error but it doesn’t affect my sound. It works ok in my system now.
Also there are some files in
/home/user/.config/pipewire/media-session.d/
check if you have something with Off in those files.
I had some entries with Off and I deleted them.
Follow this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PipeWire