Cause the nerds live underground...

There's always sound.

It takes one second to start and there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.

BUT THERE'S ALWAYS SOUND!

If a sound plays but there's no audio server to receive it and convert it to an analog signal, does it make a sound?

Who cares about sounds when you can see gamma rays :3

My sound is fine. However my screen is going down to 0% brightness and won’t budge.

I care.

Sometimes there's no sound because someone (looks at cat) ate the cables...

And I'm thinking, "what a mess were in! Hard to know where to begin."

# beep

Hey! My sound works perfectly up to 95% of the time!

Ever since Pipewire was introduced my sound just… works. Aside from missing drivers (super rarely) I have absolutely no issues.

I had a laptop with the opposite problem, it would just screech at full volume from the deepest pits of computer hell

I got super deep into synths and Linux audio years ago, and right around the same one Pipewire was starting to go mainstream. Shit just worked man!

I had some issues in pre-2019 between alsa and pulse. I don't think I have had any sound issues since then

Keep calm and

pulseaudio -k

In fact, I actually prefer jamming on my Linux boxes because of pulseeffects/easyeffects and its really nice EQ, AutoGain and other plugins.

https://github.com/megankde/pulseeffects
https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

Pulseaudio moment

I never had this until pipewire

there is some crackling with plenty of forum posts explaining how to fix these things going back to 2005 that are no longer relevant because the sound uses something with a different name now.

This is almost always because your pipewire buffers are too small (because of the defaults erring on the side of low latency) and so when the CPU is busy the buffers empty and you get some crackling. Use pw-top to see all of your devices and sources, next to the devices you should see a number in the QUANT column. Chances are that this is really low (or 1)

You can change your minimum buffer (pipewire calculates this by setting a 'quantum'), temporarily with :

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 512

You can edit /etc/pipewire/pipewire.conf and add a line under the [clocks] section:

default.clock.min-quantum = 512

Restart pipewire for the setting to take effect:

systemctl --user restart pipewire

(If your sound ever just dies for no reason, restarting pipewire is often all you need to do)

Use the temporary setting to increase the number. Lower number means a shorter buffer so, you get less audio latency in exchange for the risk of the buffer emptying. I don't have much problem with 256, but sometimes Proton adds some extra CPU overhead and I'll bump it up to 512.

Thanks for the accessibility text!

Long ago, I had SoundBlaster Live! soundcard which was perfectly capable of mixing audio on hardware under ALSA, which in my mind meant that all of the userland sound daemon nonsense could go straight to hell for all I cared. Earlier, EsounD never worked right and no app supported it directly and the wrapper utility was a hassle when it even worked. Then came PulseAudio. I could get buuutttery smooth audio on direct ALSA or laggy barely working audio on Pulse. Absolute hog.

Sure, nowadays the situation is better. But back in the day, for me, the answer to "why isn't the sound working?" was usually "you tried to use anything but direct ALSA".

I have not made the switch to Linux in the days where I still had a dedicated sound card. But I had extremely similar circumstances without a dedicated sound card. So I definitely believe you

Recently my speakers have been switching left/right. I was physically swapping them for a while, now I try and ignore it. I’m sure there’s some eldritch linux magic I too new to know like alsamixer that will fix it.

How are they connected

USB cable to the main speaker, proprietary cable from the first speaker to the second. It has blue tooth I’ve never connected to.

Funnily, I don't have sound issues on pipewire (unless I turn on my excessively big easy effect default preset).

But windows? Oh boy windows...
Listening to something after a teams call? Garbled sound. Locking your session then going back? No more sound. Connect the same Bluetooth headphones as the rest of the week? Volume get muted. Press the volume button? Nothing. Press the volume button while sound is playing? Oh hey now it works

Vintage Linux meme. I like it.

I'm saving your comment for when I'll reinstall the operating system in a few days. Thanks.

Any advice on the other issue that mutes all notification sounds? Last time I checked there were plenty of posts on how to disable power savings on pulse but not for pipewire.

ALSA worked fine for me. Pulseaudio needed constant fixing.

Pipewire + EasyEffects is perfection. No issues here :)

Funny. My experience was the exact opposite. Maybe it was bad defaults which I never managed to fix, but I could never get two apps to use sound at the same time, which meant until Pulse became the standard and fixed everything, it was always constant battles between aRts, ESD, and apps that used neither.

I spend more time dealing with my partners windows machine when it does an update getting their audio up and back to what it was, then I have with linux in 8 years (at least). And I did a major change from deb based into redhat base. And I dont even think its a bleeding edge distro issue, as I do run a Nobara system and that is based on fedora (which is still considered bleeding edge for the most part).

had that problem with mint, randomly out of the blue a horrifyingly loud screech

How old is that meme? In the other hand, I never got HDMI sound on my htpc running, so there is that ^^

i'm so confused whenever i see this, i've been using linux since 2012 and sound has always just worked? I can't think of a single time I've had an audio problem that wasn't damaged hardware

That would depend on the notification application that you're using.

Give me any details that you can think of. Software version, things you've tried, etc. I'll look into it after work

Do sounds work sometimes and then stop or is it that they're playing but the output is set to muted by default?

Thank you!

It always takes about one second to start any sound after staying silent for a little while. I managed to figure out it was a power savings mode putting the service to sleep and not waking up fast enough, for pulse it seems to be as easy as to change a true for a false to a power savings option inside a config file, I guess that in pipewire is the same but I couldn't find the option, that line probably needs to be added somewhere and I'm not sure where and what to write exactly.

The part about the muted notifications was because all the sounds shorter than one second end before the thing wakes up.

Looks like this is a common enough issue:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Noticeable_audio_delay_or_audible_pop/crack_when_starting_playback

When in doubt, look into the Arch and Gentoo wikis they have good information that's usually applicable to you even if you're not using them (mostly).

I've had a few issues along the years. Linux user since 1997

It depends. The old ALSA system was flaky from what I remember. Pipewire seems more stable, but can have issues with multiple devices but that might be more a bluetooth problem.

I've also had constant audio problems in windows, including every update shuffling all my audio devices and making a random one default and switching to the wrong device when connecting a new one.

I do have occasional buzzing/whine from easyeffects and have to restart it.

I installed Mint on my relatively new HP laptop. The sound works about 33% of the time.

I was shocked when sound started coming out of my portable monitor via HDMI when I first installed Pop… I don’t need sound, I just want my dedicated server to run!

Fedora 43. They broke Bluetooth a month ago, still broken.

Fedora 43, they break sound often by different means

I once had a problem with my sound, then i remembered that my headphones weren't plugged in. That was the only time i had no sound in linux

15 years ago I would occasionally have audio issues. These days? Nah

I do sometimes, but sometimes it's because my headphones are plugged into my monitor and I have 2 monitors and it sometimes chooses the wrong one and I don't know how to disable the other one in the gui in mint and haven't bothered to do it in command line yet 😅. Other times it's because my monitor has very temperamental displayport and hdmi ports and it gets disconnected if I bump the desk, but that happens regardless of what operating system I'm using.

Bluetooth. Like it works most of the time, but especially randomly the microphone does not work