Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?
Switching from pulseaudio daemon to pipewire-pulse
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
Switching from pulseaudio daemon to pipewire-pulse
   * What was the outcome of this action?
Music, using Audacious or anything else, breaks.  It's garbled and faint.  Doesn't matter whether I use the "pulseaudio"
backend in audacious (now feeding through pipewire) or the direct "Pipewire" backend.
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
Music keeps sounding normal

Music sounds fine if I uninstall pipewire-pulse and reinstall pulseaudio. (Which I did before filing this bug.)

This is pretty weird.  It renders pipewire unusable for me.  I've never had a previous sound system change break
catastrophically like this, so it seems like there's some really serious problem in pipewire.

I'm not having as bad an experience with pipewire-pulse as others,
but all programs that prefer pulse to alsa, like SoX, worked fine last
Debian release but now are unusable for playback because the audio
comes out crackly, as if it had lots of tiny gaps in it.

Purging pipewire-pulse, installing pulseaudio and rebooting instead,
audio players that try to use it just sit there in silence, don't respond
to Ctrl-C and, if I Ctrl-\ them, I get a 275MB core dump from SoX and
a 504MB one from spettro, instead of their usual 2MB and 270MB ones.

So, of the two... better pipewire but rather neither, though that
renders firefox silent.

The system is a 4-core amd64 thing with 8GB of RAM, so it's not that.
I'd suspect too little default buffering while hoping for low latency,
possibly in libpulse/libpulse-simple/libpulsecommon, which is what
talks to pipewire-pulse.

Best of luck finding and fixing

   M

Please report a new bug. I'm guessing you're using Debian 13 and are
saying that things worked fine for you in Debian 12. The bug you are
replying to was about things not working well on that particular
system with Debian 12 and the bug is 2.5 years old. Please mention
what desktop you are using and what specific apps don't work right
with specific test case instructions. Please include as much detail as
you can about your hardware.

Even then, these kinds of bugs are difficult to fix since the upstream
developers may want you to test with the latest kernel and the latest
versions of pipewire and related software which isn't already
available for Debian Stable.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha