No audio on calls after updating today

[Zebulon Walton]

Just updated Mobian, rebooted, and now no audio on calls. I tried rebooting a few times and it's still the same. (I didn't do dist-upgrade or install held back packages.)

Anyone else experience this problem? I do have a working image backup from about 5 days ago that can be restored to the eMMC. However for now to make or receive calls I'm booting up on the Arch SD card I made up recently and will try updating Mobian again over the next several days to see if further updates fix the problem. (I don't want to re-image the eMMC on a regular basis since that will wear the flash memory. I've only done it once so far since owning the phone.)

[treebeard]

Just updated Mobian, rebooted, and now no audio on calls. I tried rebooting a few times and it's still the same. (I didn't do dist-upgrade or install held back packages.)

Anyone else experience this problem? I do have a working image backup from about 5 days ago that can be restored to the eMMC. However for now to make or receive calls I'm booting up on the Arch SD card I made up recently and will try updating Mobian again over the next several days to see if further updates fix the problem. (I don't want to re-image the eMMC on a regular basis since that will wear the flash memory. I've only done it once so far since owning the phone.)

I did a dist-upgrade and do have audio for calls.  I do have various other audio glitches - sometimes ringing on internal speaker rather than external being a common one.  I suppose this is all due to the pipewire transistion.  Bookworm freezes begin in January so maybe we'll start seeing more stability in a couple months?

[Zebulon Walton]

I did a dist-upgrade and do have audio for calls.  I do have various other audio glitches - sometimes ringing on internal speaker rather than external being a common one.  I suppose this is all due to the pipewire transistion.  Bookworm freezes begin in January so maybe we'll start seeing more stability in a couple months?

Thanks, it certainly could be a pipewire issue. Linux audio is just such a danged mess.

I can give dist-upgrade a try but as I recall there were only a handful of held back packages and they mostly related to the vlc media player. (Actually what I usually do now instead of dist-upgrade is install each of the held back packages individually and check what's going to be done for each before proceeding. The last time I did a dist-upgrade the Settings application went away!) I'll have to play around with it some more. As long as I have a working SD card to fall back on there's some breathing room.

[Zebulon Walton]

To follow up on this, after installing today's Mobian updates audio appears to be working on calls again. Still have to do more testing, particularly with the headset, but so far it appears to be OK. (Assuming all is working I won't be doing any more updates any time soon!)

[bosi564]

Bookworm freezes begin in January so maybe we'll start seeing more stability in a couple months?

That'd be good. I've reverted to a cheap feature phone (which unfortunately also has audio problems sometimes) and I'm testing the pinephone as a PDA for now.

[Zebulon Walton]

Bookworm freezes begin in January so maybe we'll start seeing more stability in a couple months?

Hopefully! My audio dropped out again on Mobian for no apparent reason. Ran updates to see if it would help and it appeared to then work, but then stopped working again the next time the phone was booted. For now it's back to my "known to work" Arch SD card. (It has its own glitches but is usable.) When I get a chance I'll re-image the eMMC with my last known good Mobian backup image and just not update at least until it looks like things are a bit more stable.

[treebeard]

Bookworm freezes begin in January so maybe we'll start seeing more stability in a couple months?

Hopefully! My audio dropped out again on Mobian for no apparent reason. Ran updates to see if it would help and it appeared to then work, but then stopped working again the next time the phone was booted. For now it's back to my "known to work" Arch SD card. (It has its own glitches but is usable.) When I get a chance I'll re-image the eMMC with my last known good Mobian backup image and just not update at least until it looks like things are a bit more stable.

Something you might try before restoring an image is reverting to pulseaudio.  It might be as simple as stopping&disabling the pipewire-related services and enabling&starting the pulseaudio services.

FWIW, I found this issue that seems to describe what I've been experiencing - audio going to the wrong place.

[Zebulon Walton]

Something you might try before restoring an image is reverting to pulseaudio.  It might be as simple as stopping&disabling the pipewire-related services and enabling&starting the pulseaudio services.

FWIW, I found this issue that seems to describe what I've been experiencing - audio going to the wrong place.

Good idea, I'll see if reverting back to pulseaudio helps. All of the serious audio problems (those making the phone unusable) occurred after switching to pipewire. It does seem to be an audio profile issue, with audio being routed in this case apparently to /dev/null.

---

Followup - I went back to pulseaudio and audio appears to be working now, basically the same way it was before moving to pipewire. That is, audio on calls is working but the volume control does not work. The volume display pops up on the screen and the indicator moves but volume does not actually change. (The volume control does work properly when playing audio or video files through the internal loudspeaker.)

The internal earpiece volume is slightly low and the wired headset a little too loud. The workaround for this is to press the phone tightly against the ear when using the phone's internal sound and pull the earphone slightly out of the ear when using the headset. After several reboots the audio is still working, so at least it's stable.

So, while it's inconvenient not having working volume control during calls at least the phone can be used. (As I recall the volume control problem is why I tried pipewire in the first place. While that did work for a while it does no good if there's no audio output at all!)

[BaronAlbatross]

Something you might try before restoring an image is reverting to pulseaudio.  It might be as simple as stopping&disabling the pipewire-related services and enabling&starting the pulseaudio services.

FWIW, I found this issue that seems to describe what I've been experiencing - audio going to the wrong place.

Good idea, I'll see if reverting back to pulseaudio helps. All of the serious audio problems (those making the phone unusable) occurred after switching to pipewire. It does seem to be an audio profile issue, with audio being routed in this case apparently to /dev/null.

---

Followup - I went back to pulseaudio and audio appears to be working now, basically the same way it was before moving to pipewire. That is, audio on calls is working but the volume control does not work. The volume display pops up on the screen and the indicator moves but volume does not actually change. (The volume control does work properly when playing audio or video files through the internal loudspeaker.)

The internal earpiece volume is slightly low and the wired headset a little too loud. The workaround for this is to press the phone tightly against the ear when using the phone's internal sound and pull the earphone slightly out of the ear when using the headset.  After several reboots the audio is still working, so at least it's stable.

So, while it's inconvenient not having working volume control during calls at least the phone can be used. (As I recall the volume control problem is why I tried pipewire in the first place. While that did work for a while it does no good if there's no audio output at all!)

If you have the time, could you spell out your process please? I have an important call tomorrow and I have no time at all to get it wrong and make a bigger mess!

[Zebulon Walton]

If you have the time, could you spell out your process please? I have an important call tomorrow and I have no time at all to get it wrong and make a bigger mess!

If you're talking about going back to pulseaudio after having moved to pipewire, it was basically a matter of reversing what was done - disable pipewire and re-enable pulseaudio. I had to play around with it a bit but it came down to the following commands run as the normal mobian user:

Code:

# Disable pipewire
systemctl --user stop pipewire pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user disable pipewire pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pipewire pipewire.socket pipewire-pulse

# Enable pulseaudio
systemctl --user unmask pulseaudio pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user enable pulseaudio pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user start pulseaudio pulseaudio.socket

It's a good idea to keep a "known to work" SD card on hand just in case. Don't update it once it's you have it in a workable state. Having that has saved my bacon on a few occasions.