How do I teach Pipewire to pick the right output?

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#1

Pipewire isn’t as random as PulseAudio was, but it still doesn’t necessarily do the right thing when I’m plugging and unplugging devices from my laptop.

What I want to tell my system is:

  • If my BT headphones are attached, use them
  • If no BT headphones, use the HDMI output through my docking station
  • If no HDMI, use the laptop speakers
  • never use the digital or analog outputs on my docking station

This seems like something that ought to be easy to do with priority/weighing, right? So, if the heaviest gets selected:

  • BT Headphones = 100
  • HDMI = 50
  • built-in = 10
  • usb digital = -1
  • usb analog = -1

but, I don’t see a way to do that in pipewire. I’ve seen a couple things that suggest changing ALSA priority in /usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/paths, but those files come from the OS, and may get stomped on in an upgrade. Is this something I can do?

#2

For HDMI and internal speaker, you could use wpctl to make HDMI as default if available.

Run wpctl status and find part:

Audio
...
 │  
 ├─ Sinks:
 │      45. Built-in Audio Digital Stereo (HDMI) [vol: 0.74]
 │  *   46. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo        [vol: 0.54]
...

As you can see above the * sign is on Built in speaker (default). From above example we could change it to HDMI with wpctl set-default 45 where 45 is ID number of HDMI sink (see above).

Bellow are the result:

Audio
...
 ├─ Sinks:
 │  *   45. Built-in Audio Digital Stereo (HDMI) [vol: 0.74]
 │      46. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo        [vol: 0.54]

For Headphone (cable or bluetooth) as top priority, it should be already the default from ALSA configuration.