Strawberry kills browser audio

crhwv

If I run Strawberry and select DAC output, I no longer get audio from my browser. I'm guessing it steps on or locks out the pipewire-pulse daemon. Restarting the daemon doesn't help. Quitting Strawberry doesn't help.

Tested on:

Fedora 35
Topping D10 DAC
Firefox
Opera

jonas

@crhwv
That sounds like an issue with PulseAudio. If you you got PulseAudio installed, make sure you to select PulseAudio as output (or Auto) in the backend settings (not ALSA) to avoid such issues.

crhwv

@jonas Thanks! The reason I don't use PulseAudio is it converts everything to 48 Hz, so I'm selecting the DAC instead of Pulse and I get 96hz, 192, etc. I'm sure the problem does lay with Pulse and the way the OS handles audio, maybe some people have seen this problem and know a workaround?

jonas

I just saw you mentioned pipewire-pulse, but I guess you are using PipeWire without PulseAudio then.
My experience has not been great with pipewire either, when openSUSE first came with Pipewire, it was installed automatically without my knowledge, I had a similar or identical issue, the browser stopped working when I had my hw:0,0 setup in Strawberry. I did some testing back then, and found that PipeWire was wasn't working at all without PulseAudio (or at least not with hw), removing PipeWire fixed the issue for me. I always lock pipewire and pulseaudio packages so they can't be installed even after a distro update. I don't know if PipeWire have fixed the issue or not.

crhwv

Yes, disabling Pulse and Pipewire fixes a lot of problems, I'd done that for years to allow Kodi to see my AV Receiver as a soundcard. However, I lose browser audio.

But I think I found a solution, after running Strawberry, using:

systemctl restart --user pipewire

And I get back audio on the Opera browser.

@jonas said in Strawberry kills browser audio:

I just saw you mentioned pipewire-pulse, but I guess you are using PipeWire without PulseAudio then.
My experience has not been great with pipewire either, when openSUSE first came with Pipewire, it was installed automatically without my knowledge, I had a similar or identical issue, the browser stopped working when I had my hw:0,0 setup in Strawberry. I did some testing back then, and found that PipeWire was wasn't working at all without PulseAudio (or at least not with hw), removing PipeWire fixed the issue for me. I always lock pipewire and pulseaudio packages so they can't be installed even after a distro update. I don't know if PipeWire have fixed the issue or not.

GarethFuller

@jonas Hello! I also have a similar problem, though with a different set up.

Ubuntu 20.04 & 22.04 (Just upgraded- same problem on both distros)
JDS Labs Element II DAC/Amp
Brave & Firefox browsers

Strawberry Backend Settings:
Output to a sound card via ALSA
Device JDS Labs Element II USB Audio

hw:1,0

ALSA plugin: hw selected, out of the following options

hw
plughw
pcm

I'm trying to play high resolution FLAC files (192khz/24bit), so I'd prefer to avoid downsampling to 48khz if possible.

Thank you for your time, and thanks for the work you and the other developers put into strawberry- I wouldn't want to use anything else.
-GarethFuller