Fedora 35 - Headphones stopped working after "systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber"

Hi, all. I could not find a thread that could help me with this issue so I have started this new thread.

After updating to Fedora 35 a week ago the headphones did not work, but this was corrected by installing pavucontrol.

Except the microphone would not work on my Slack channel, or so I thought. It could still record my voice on my computer. I missed the fact my Slack microphone setting was “mute” and misdiagnosed the problem.

Before realizing that I tried systemctl --user enable --now wireplumber as suggested in another thread. This is where things really went wrong, the headphones stopped working completely.

This is a one-way trip; running systemctl --user disable --now wireplumber shuts down all sound.

After hours of trial-and-error with far too many changes to account for here I got the microphone to record my voice and playback to my HDMI TV speakers. The headphone output volume meters - both pipewire and pavucontrol - show activity during the speaker test but I cannot hear “Front Left Front Right”. I cannot hear anything over the headphones: YouTube, desktop recordings, the sound tests, these are all mute.

I removed and re-installed pavucontrol, re-booted several times, made sure the alsamixer settings were not muted on any sound cards then alsactl store to make sure these settings were retained.

For what it’s worth the headphones are two 3.5 mm TRS jacks, not USB, but that does not seem to be the issue.

The results of rpm -qa|grep -iE ‘pulse|wireplumber|pipewire’|sort

gvncpulse-1.2.0-3.fc35.x86_64
kde-settings-pulseaudio-35.0-1.fc35.noarch
pipewire0.2-libs-0.2.7-6.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-alsa-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-gstreamer-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-libs-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-pulseaudio-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pipewire-utils-0.3.39-1.fc35.x86_64
pulseaudio-libs-15.0-2.fc35.x86_64
pulseaudio-libs-glib2-15.0-2.fc35.x86_64
wireplumber-0.4.4-3.fc35.x86_64
wireplumber-libs-0.4.4-3.fc35.x86_64

There is more information I could give but this site caps the number of words, attachments and so on that new users are allowed to provide. The alsa-info and sys-info files are too large.

For a next time when you update please check before updating:

The change-logs !
Releases/34/ChangeSet - Fedora Project Wiki
Releases/35/ChangeSet - Fedora Project Wiki

F34 > came up with Pipewire as a substitution for pulseaudio.
F35 > wireplumber replaced pipewire-media-session

Read the ChangeSet of both versions and undo what you not like. You will find the changes while following the links in the ChangeSet.

1 Like

sudo dnf update fixed the problem