No sound devices after disconnecting HDMI

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1

I’m having some issues with my audio devices management on my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 5th.

First, when I connect the laptop to an HDMI monitor, it doesn’t switch automatically to the HDMI audio output, switching to it manually fixes the problem.

Second, when I disconnect the laptop from HDMI, all sound devices disappear from GNOME Control Center, no sound at all! The only way to fix it is to restart PipeWire.

What could be happening? Misconfig (I don’t recall touching anything in the PipeWire config)? Should I try wireplumber? Good time to upgrade to F40?

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2

There is a similar looking and open bug report here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/issues/209

You might ask in that report if what you are seeing is another case of the same problem.

3

I’ve encountered the same bug on Fedora 40 with my X1 Carbon 5th Gen. To get audio playback on the laptop speakers after disconnecting the HDMI/USB-C output, I need to manually switch the output audio device back to the internal speakers beforehand. Otherwise, it doesn’t work at all. A reboot doesn’t seem to help either.

4

I found the following script online that seems to resolve the issue where the output device doesn’t switch back to internal audio after disconnecting an external display.

# Move any contents inside `~/.local/state/wireplumber` to other place as backup.
mv ~/.local/state/wireplumber ~/_backup/state

# This command will  reinitialize your ALSA profile.
alsactl init

# Restart  pipewire and wireplumber
systemctl --user restart pipewire
systemctl --user restart wireplumber

# Check again with `wpctl status`.
wpctl status
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5

You’re the MVP. Worked like a charm for me.

Thanks a ton.