F41: Switching from Pipewire to Pulseaudio

Ask Fedora
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1

After upgrading from Fedora 40 to 41 I am getting annoying Pulseaudio glitches. I filed the biggest one as 2350968 – Intel HDA audio - profiles prioritize HDMI, auto switch between speaker/headphones not working ; also sometimes even manual “profile” switching between headphones and speaker produces erratic results. To avoid the glitches I’d like to switch to Pulseaudio; I do not need low-latency audio processing.

But all threads here and on Reddit about switching to Pulseaudio are over a year old.

Is it still possible to switch from Pipewire to Pulsaudio safely in Fedora 41, and if so, how?

2

Did you try the command recommended in the older thread?
Can’t imagine it will have changed.

sudo dnf swap --allowerasing pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio

4

Tried this now but the result was not inspiring. The “profiles” and associated glitches remained exactly the same. Also JamesDSP, which supports Pipewire directly, still used Pipewire, so wasn’t able to catch outputs of applications that use Pulsaudio.

So Pulseaudio did not actually replace Pipewire - Plasma and JamesDSP, which connect to Pipewire directly, used Pipewire. And most importantly I did not get rid of the “profiles” that now make it hard to switch btetween headphones and speaker, which happened automatically before the upgrade to F41.

Is it possible to actually remove Pipewire and make everything sound-related, including switching and volume control in Plasma, work via Pulseaudio?

5

I did this yesterday and almost for the same reasons as you.
After installing pulseaudio packages,

systemctl --user stop pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket
systemctl --user disable pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket
systemctl --user mask pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse.socket
systemctl --user enable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user start pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

and at the end of process, you should see this after inxi -A command

plumber@fedora:~$ inxi -A
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Cannon Lake PCH cAVS driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: NVIDIA TU106 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-3: Kingston HyperX Cloud Stinger Core + 7.1
    driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
  API: ALSA v: k6.13.6-200.fc41.x86_64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PulseAudio v: 17.0 status: active