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