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.

@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?

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