I recently booted my Mac up (KDE, Fedora 41) and found that I couldn’t adjust the speaker volume at all. I tried using the function keys, taskbar slider, and the options in system settings. I could still however mute the speakers completely.
One thing I noticed is that the name of the speaker device had changed from “Macbook J313 Speakers” to “Raw Speaker Device (do not use)”. This makes me think that speakersafetyd or something in the asahi-audio framework failed.
I do remember recently installing an asahi-audio update, so I thought that could be it.
The issue seems to be intermittent, sometimes I boot up and I can adjust the speakers perfectly.
This is strange. A possible fix could by to clean wireplumber’s cached state in ~/.local/state/wireplumber/. Please copy the files to some place to compare them to the new state if this fixes the issue.
I’m not sure what would cause this but there are occasionally similar reports. My best guess is that some applications are confused by the audio setup. Both internal speakers and microphone use DSP pipelines and hide the raw audio devices.
Downgrading asahi-audio is not a good option as asahi-audio-3.1 is required for microphone support.