Controlling Pipewire's Misconfigured Audio Output Sinks (Shallow Thoughts)

Controlling Pipewire's Misconfigured Audio Output Sinks

One of the worst breakages from the *grade (I hesitate to call it an upgrade) to Debian Trixie was audio. The old PulseAudio setup — which had been working beautifully for the last several years — was replaced by a new sound system called Pipewire that sits on top of PulseAudio and, well, basically, breaks it.

Recently I decided it was finally time to figure out Pipewire's broken handling of audio output. The main problem: half the time, upon booting, my audio doesn't work, and if I run pavucontrol to see the configuration, I see three different HDMI audio devices as well as the laptop's built-in Intel audio chip. Most of the time my laptop is plugged in to an HDMI monitor, yes — but that monitor has no speakers or other audio hardware, so I basically never want HDMI audio. And in any case there's only one monitor connected, not three.

(And yes, there are occasionally times I might want HDMI sound, like if I want to give a presentation over a projector that uses sound. That has happened to me once in my life, so far.)

So every time I boot, there's a good chance that audio won't work and I'll have to fire up pavucontrol, go to the Output Devices tab, mute all three of the HDMI sinks, unmute the built-in speaker sink, and click the button to make the built-in speaker the default sink. (There's no way to tell what the previous default was: pavucontrol, although it has buttons to set a sink as default, doesn't show what the current default is.)

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