Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?
I installed the pipewire-audio package, which pulls in pipewire-alsa
as a dependency.
   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
I found that in order for espeakup to work, I had to remove pipewire-audio
as well as pipewire-alsa.
   * What was the outcome of this action?
This allows espeakup to work again.
   * What outcome did you expect instead?
I expected that espeakup would work with the pipewire-alsa package installed.

Note that I have no issues with Espeakup, even when pulseaudio is installed.
Thus, as Pipewire is replacing pulseaudio, and in fact, mostly works well as
a replacement, I consider this a high priority bug.  For now, my system has
both pipewire and pulseaudio, but with the pipewire-audio meta package
and pipewire-alsa purged.

Hi

Adam Myrow wrote am 04.02.2026,  8:49 -0600:
  * What led up to the situation?
[…]

Pipewire runs as user service and grabs exclusive access to the audio device.
Espeakup hence cannot access the soundcard anymore. Just for reference,
similar issues occurred with Pulseaudio, AFAIK.

Please try the package pipewire-system-services which is meant to help in this
situation. A system-wide pipewire instance is shared between the default user
account and espeakup. I'm not an espeakup user myself, but you might need to
configure it to use pipewire, still.

Hi

Adam Myrow wrote am 04.02.2026,  8:49 -0600:
  * What led up to the situation?
[…]

Pipewire runs as user service and grabs exclusive access to the audio device.
Espeakup hence cannot access the soundcard anymore. Just for reference,
similar issues occurred with Pulseaudio, AFAIK.

Please try the package pipewire-system-services which is meant to help in this
situation. A system-wide pipewire instance is shared between the default user
account and espeakup. I'm not an espeakup user myself, but you might need to
configure it to use pipewire, still.