I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even know what Pulse Audio is. It should just quietly do it’s thing. The fact that I know it’s name tells you enough. I have to constantly kill it in order to stop terrible audio distortions. It often struggles managing multiple audio sources from different applications. It completely fails at managing bluetooth devices often forcing audio output that sounds like AM radio and requiring a complete system reset in order to allow high fidelity output. Pulse Audio is the worse and most unacceptable part of my Linux Distro and should be completely abandoned as a total failure and an embarrassment to any developer who is shameless enough to take credit for working on it.
I think pipewire might solve your problems?
How do you go about ripping out and replacing something as integral as your sound server system?
Really easily actually. Install a few packages, remove pulseaudio, start the services, and everything works as if nothing changed.
what distro is it?
Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon
It seems Linux Mint 20 may not have all the packages you’d need to replace Pulseaudio. You may want to think about updating to a newer version. Otherwise, you can still make it work but you’d need to acquire the packages manually as they’re not in the repos.
What you need is
pipewire,wireplumber, andpipewire-pulse. Then, you can dosystemctl --user disable --now pulseaudio systemctl --user enable --now pipewire systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber systemctl --user enable --now pipewire-pulseThat should replace pulseaudio and enable a compatibility layer allowing pulseaudio programs to seamlessly interface with pipewire.
I didn’t even realize my version was out-of-date. I just upgraded to 20 a few months ago. WhoamI suggests that Pipewire is the standard sound server system in version 21 already, so I guess the Mint team was ahead of me about being done with pulseaudio.
I think it’s really cool you can just transition something as integral as the sound server system with essentially a few on/off switches.
I wish I was a better operator. Linux is an incredible system and I have the faintest idea about how to do anything with it.
It uses DPKG package manager
have you used other disros on the same machine and experienced the same problems?
I see Mint 21 has pipewire but 20 doesn’t. Is it possible to upgrade?
Would you consider another distro?
I know this can frustrating, just looking to help however I can
I feel as though I just Upgraded from 19 to 20 a few months ago. I don’t recall having so many problems with Pulse Audio before that upgrade. The upgrade process is relatively simple. Mint does a fairly good job with the process. It was like three terminal commands; one to download the upgrade, one to check the upgrade to make sure it wasn’t going to break everything, and finally “mint upgrade upgrade”
I’ve been using Mint on this same machine for at least the last six years. I don’t have any problem considering another distro if there’s one worth trying. I don’t really know if there are better ones to try.
I’m guessing by how quickly 21 followed 20 and the fact that 21 made the change to pipewire this was a common enough and a serious enough issue.
Thanks for the help. Even if it just came down to upgrading my distro to 21, an easy solution is way better than a complicated one.
Six years same distro on one machine is a good run. I don’t have much experience running Mint (Debian mostly) so I can’t say if it’s part of some bigger problem. Upgrading shouldn’t be difficult.
You could also consider how pipewire is on other distros. Fedora is constantly getting new tech earlier than some other distros, so pipewire has been there for some time.
FWIW, on debian I always got rid of pulseaudio and just used ALSA, until pipewire came around.