Various audio breakages on the PinePhone

July 03, 20242 min. read

Various issues have come together to break audio on the PinePhone.

First, for all DEs that use pulseaudio for audio, users will not have any audio. This is because pulseaudio keeps crashing with:

[pulseaudio] alsa-ucm.c: Assertion 'dev == data->device' failed at ../src/modules/alsa/alsa-ucm.c:1562, function pa_alsa_ucm_set_port(). Aborting.

This issue happened with the pulseaudio v17 upgrade. It will be fixed by this aports MR.

Next, for DEs that use pipewire-pulse for audio, users will have audio from regular applications, but audio during a call will not work. This is because of the pipewire v1.2.0 upgrade which changed how the sound card exposes audio profiles. The issue is that callaudiod does not understand these new profiles, so it does not switch to the Voice Call profile when a call is connected. Audio playback outside of a call is unaffected.

Note that once the pulseaudio crash is fixed by the above aports MR, the fixed pulseaudio will also generate the same new profiles like pipewire v1.2.0 does, which callaudiod will not understand. So simply using the pulseaudio packages from that aports MR's CI will unfortunately not help with functional call audio.

The issue is being discussed in #2968

If you urgently need audio / call audio to work, the most straightforward workaround is to switch to v24.06. The pulseaudio package in v24.06 is v16 that doesn't crash and doesn't generate the new profiles that break callaudiod. The pipewire-pulse package also doesn't generate the new profiles that break callaudiod.

Additional workarounds are listed below, but note that these workarounds are more advanced, so do not perform them if you don't understand them.

Error relocating /usr/lib/libwireplumber-0.5.so.0: pw_log_set_level_string: symbol not found

... then you will also need to downgrade wireplumber to 0.5.3, otherwise you will not have any audio at all.