this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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Can I remove Pipewire-ALSA without removing Pipewire itself? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by ohshit604@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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This kinda stems from this issue I asked about a while back, Pipewire an PulseAudio have caused me quite a bit of confusion lately as I recently started experiencing crackling/static sounds from my Bluetooth speaker when playing audio.

After days of digging and thinking that I’ve fixed the issue by editing /usr/share/piperwire.conf and /usr/share/pipewire-pulse.conf and following guides like this one (I know the link is for EndeavorOS) I have seem to come to the conclusion that Pipewire-ALSA is the issue to the crackling/static sounds I’m hearing.

I stumbled upon qpwgraph which appears to visualize the flow and when I disconnect Pipewire-ALSA from the flow the cracking sounds stop, now from my understanding Pipewire and PulseAudio cannot coexist which is causing my confusion because Pipewire-ALSA also appears to connect to a bunch of PulseAudio Volume Controllers.

Edit; I failed to mention my distro or hardware:

-------------
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) x86_64
Kernel: Linux 6.12.48+deb13-amd64
Uptime: 2 hours, 19 mins
Packages: 4836 (dpkg), 50 (flatpak), 5 (snap)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Display (VG249Q3A): 1920x1080 @ 165 Hz in 24" [External] *
Display (ASUS VG24V): 1920x1080 @ 120 Hz in 23" [External]
DE: KDE Plasma 6.3.6
WM: KWin (X11)
WM Theme: Nothing
Theme: Breeze (Nothing) [Qt], Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
Icons: breeze-dark [Qt], breeze-dark [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Noto Sans (10pt) [Qt], Noto Sans (10pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: WhiteSur (24px)
Terminal: konsole 25.4.2
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 (12) @ 4.60 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti [Discrete]
Memory: 9.36 GiB / 15.54 GiB (60%)
Swap: 1.26 GiB / 6.91 GiB (18%)
Disk (/): 172.66 GiB / 232.24 GiB (74%) - ext4
Disk (/media/user/Barracuda): 1.58 TiB / 1.78 TiB (89%) - ext4
Local IP (enp4s0): 192.168.1.17/24
Locale: en_US.UTF-8
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[–] axum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Pipewire-pulse provides compatibility to programs that may not directly support pipewire yet.

Pipewire was developed to be a total drop in replacement to the Pulse audio sound server. It has compatibility layers that allow other things to talk to it.

Edit: debian is not showing pipewire-alsa as a hard dependency of pipewire https://packages.debian.org/trixie/pipewire

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

I've run into the crackling problem recently as well. I think the ALSA module is improperly requesting a very low quant value causing applications to have a tiny audio buffer which they fail to keep filled, resulting in crackling.

To see if this is what's happening, try running pw-top and see if the quant column is a small number (~200). This is a very short audio buffer, it'll be low latency but if the source application can't keep the buffer filled then you will get the crackling effect. You can increase this value by setting a global minimum with:

pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum 2048

It will set the audio buffer to 1024/48000 seconds (or .0434s, 43.4ms). It will introduce a bit of latency (you can decrease the quant to 512 for ~20ms if you need lower latency).

This will not persist past a reboot, you'd have to edit a config file for that (pipewire.conf, maybe?).

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Yes, but make sure you don't remove Alsa itself.