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I learnt something important about Linux audio last night.

I noticed that I had no sound in X-Plane 12 (a flight simulator) while also being in a Discord call in Firefox. Apparently, certain FMOD applications check if PulseAudio is installed and fall back to ALSA if it isn't. Now, I have PipeWire installed to fix the mess that is Linux audio once and for all. So TECHNICALLY PulseAudio is not installed. And that's exactly what X-Plane detected, which then tried to gain complete control over the sound hardware through ALSA, which it couldn't.

The "fix" was to symlink `/bin/pulseaudio` to `/bin/true` to make it look like PulseAudio is available which tricked X-Plane into going through PulseAudio (and therefore through PipeWire) instead.

That was one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered.

#linux #audio #xplane #xplane12 #discord #firefox #alsa #pulseaudio #pipewire #fmod #flightsim

#linux #firefox #discord #audio #pipewire #alsa #pulseaudio #xplane #xplane12 #fmod #flightsim
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Felix Urbasik

JRSofty
JRSofty
• •

I find this very interesting. In the past I've fought with Linux audio issues, particularly with Pulse audio. I've never heard of PipeWire before, and will keep it in mind for the future.

It's still kind of funny that you still had to hack around to get it to work. I enjoy Linux mostly because you learn a lot about how to get things to work 😁

in reply to JRSofty

Felix Urbasik
Felix Urbasik
• •
PipeWire is great, it aims to solve the mess by simply supporting all possible standards. On top of that, you get tools like qpwgraph (https://github.com/rncbc/qpwgraph) that allow you to redirect any output to any other input, very useful!

GitHub - rncbc/qpwgraph: qpwgraph - A PipeWire Graph Qt GUI Interface

qpwgraph - A PipeWire Graph Qt GUI Interface. Contribute to rncbc/qpwgraph development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
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