What distro are you on?
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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I'm using the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 22.1. I was going to mention this in the post but I wasn't sure if I needed to, seeing that this issue seems to be present in other distros as well and I'm not the only person to experience this issue with this sound card.
While it's not the solution you're looking for, you can always write a script for those commands, and have it run on each startup.
I had an issue like this recently on Debian testing and it turns out fluidsynth was hogging the sound device and so pipewire couldn't open it. IDK why it was doing that all of a sudden. The symptom was also just having the dummy device.
I think what I did to figure this out was look at the pipewire logs and it said something to the effect that it couldn't open the sound device because it was busy, and according to my bash history I did fuser -fv /dev/snd/* and figured out it was fluidsynth that was using it, which I then disabled or maybe uninstalled because wtf do I need midi for anyway.
Your problem may be different, but I can imagine, theoretically, that all the stuff you're doing makes it so pulseaudio gets first dibs on the (otherwise busy) sound device and so maybe you have misdiagnosed the problem.
When I run that command, I get:
$ fuser -fv /dev/snd/* USER PID ACCESS COMMAND /dev/snd/controlC0: j 2002 F.... wireplumber j 11734 F.... pulseaudio /dev/snd/seq: j 1998 F.... pipewire
I know pulseaudio is only running because I manually ran it, so could it be wireplumber that's causing the issue?
I mean it's definitely weird that wireplumber and pulseaudio are running simultanously, that is probably not great (or maybe it's harmless, idk), but it's normal when using pipewire to have wireplumber on control0.
Anyway you should try running fuser before you apply your fix.
Also I deleted my original post, because I wasn't super happy about it, and made new one, so now there are two versions of this post. Sorry.
i stopped having such problems ever since i switched to wayland. i guess you could find the right configs and persist it with ALSA and PulseAudio config files
I tried looking into configuring alsa and pulseaudio but the only configuration they seem to have aren't applicable to my issue. I would just switch to wayland but none of my currently preferred desktop environments have full wayland support.
sorry, i of course meant PipeWire, wayland has nothing to do with audio.
Ok well, pipewire is what's pre-installed and as of now neither pipewire nor pulseaudio are working. I have already uninstalled pulseaudio, as I would like to just use what's preinstalled if I can get it working again.
I mean something must have changed three days ago, kernel update maybe? You could try running a different kernel and see if this fixes it automagically.
I recently also had an issue where I could only see a dummy device, and that got me wondering. It was caused by fluidsynth hogging the audio device. So maybe could you check something? Look at the log file for pipewire (journalctl --user -u pipewire here) and do fuser -fv /dev/snd/* when it's still in its broken state to see if (maybe) you're misdiagnosing the problem. Because I could possibly sort of imagine that doing the force-reload and start pulseaudio dance might actually have seemingly fixed my fluidsynth issue by inadvertently making it so that pulseaudio got a hold of the audio device.
I thought that it was a kernel update too but the last time it was updated was two weeks ago and nothing else relevant to audio was updated either.
I've restarted my computer and the fuser command does show mutiple instances of fluidsynth. I also ran the journalctl command and I'm getting a bunch of the same error messages over and over again. They are:
mod.jackdbus-detect: Failed to receive jackdbus reply: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.jackaudio.service was not provided by any .service files
spa.alsa: 'front:0': playback open failed: Device or resource busy
mod.adapter: 0x5794b3a2b2a0: can't get format: Device or resource busy
Yeah actually looks like the same issue I had. Just uninstall fluidsynth with apt remove fluidsynth and (probably) reboot, and see if that fixes it.
Nope, that didn't work. In fact, it made the issue worse because now I can't get audio to work at all because my normal audio devices are missing again. I also tried running the commands again and the journalctl command is still giving me the same error messages and fuser states that the only thing running is pipewire.
Also, for some reason, my computer took a longer time to boot than normal and it made me input my password at startup, which I have Linux Mint configured to just automatically log me in without it. So if you have any further suggestions that require a restart, I don't feel comfortable restarting my computer again and I will try them tomorrow.
Oh, I'm sorry. Can you run systemd-analyze blame (and also systemd-analyze --user blame) and look for something, near the top, that took a long time? Also systemctl list-units --failed to see if something has failed to load properly.
I'm afraid to ask, and I should have thought of that, do you remember if uninstalling fluidsynth removed anything else?
Also maybe try uninstalling pulseaudio, it's possible it's fighting with pipewire over the device, but that's just a guess.
I just saw you edit and I did just remove pulseaudio.
Oh good. Maybe you can try restarting pipewire w/o rebooting.
First, check if pulse is running (it might be even if uninstalled), with systemctl --user list-units (search for pulse by typing /pulse) or ps -A|grep pulse and kill it with (probably) something like systemctl --user stop pulseaudio or maybe killall pulseaudio. Not sure what's better here, but it needs to be killed if it's running.
Then do systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber.
For some reason the the "stop" command didn't work as it thought pulseaudio wasn't running but I was able terminate it through htop. Also, that didn't work, it did restart pipewire but my normal audio devices are still missing and I still don't have working audio. I did, just in case, also check the journalctl and fuser commands you gave me previously, and fuser still just lists pipewire and journalctl stil gives the same error messages as before.
Yeah I wrote that stop command wrong, it's supposed to be systemctl --user stop pulseaudio. The relevant errors from journalctl were the "busy" errors. Are they still there? Maybe they're old messages? You can type G to go to the end of the log.
Also, and this is probably my last suggestion, try restarting the socket with systemctl --user restart pipewire-pulse.socket. And maybe restart all the other crap as well for good measure. My theory here is that pulseaudio overwrote that socket with it's own socket, and anything trying to play sound would be trying to connect to the nonexistent pulseaudio, and maybe restarting pipewire doesn't actually recreate the socket, because systemd does that, but I'm not sure that's actually how that works.
Theoretically logging out and in again should also restart all the things pipewire I think, but it's possible that whatever is slowing down your boot is actually slowing down the login, so do at your own risk.
Ok, so a lot of them are old messages, none of the messages from this session are labeled as busy. I did just try logging out and back in and that was pretty much instantaneous, so whatever it was that caused my computer to boot slowly just effect the boot itself. But yeah, I tried restarting pipewire and everything related to it and it's still just showing the dummy output device and audio isn't working. Thanks for trying though.
If we assume, for a moment, that your issue was in fact related to fluidsynth, which I kinda still think it might be, because of what fuser and the logs showed, it would be a good idea to undo your module blacklist thingy and reboot.
If your slow boot issue persists, and you try to fix that tomorrow, then try looking at the bootup messages as described here:
If you reinstall pulseaudio to get back to where you were before, uninstall pipewire, those two shouldn't be running simultaneously.
Good luck and keep me updated if you manage to fix it somehow.
Ok, even though I said I'd wait until tomorrow, I decided to try it again. It seemed to boot more or less normally but I did try someone else's suggestion and it got audio working again. I did undo the edit I made to the modprobe blacklist and I did keep fluidsynth and pulseaudio uninstalled but I tried using the wireplumber ppa, like someone else suggested and my audio is working again. Granded, I have no idea what actually fixed the issue, so I don't know who to fully credit but thanks for helping.
Glad you got it working.
I'm not sure how long everything takes normally but systemd-udev-settle.service took over two minutes. When running it with --user the longest was xdg-desktop-portal.service, which took 6 seconds. The third command gives:
UNIT LOAD ACTIVE SUB DESCRIPTION ● casper-md5check.service loaded failed failed casper-md5check Verify Live ISO checksums ● systemd-udev-settle.service loaded failed failed Wait for udev To Complete Device Initialization ● vboxdrv.service loaded failed failed VirtualBox Linux kernel module
Also, no I did check and fluidsynth was the only thing removed. I think it did for some reason add some of Wine's dependencies to autoremove but I'll deal with those later.
Yeah not sure about that. My guess is the casper-md5check is irrelevant, not sure why udev would be affected by installing/uninstalling audio stuff, and also not sure if that actually slows down your boot, my guess would be no. vboxdrv and virtualbox are probably also irrelevant.
I think I should have included systemctl --user list-units --failed previously.
Ok and that command doesn't list anything.
Shot in the dark here...
You said that blacklisting the module brought back your device, but not the sound. Is it possible that pulse is selecting the dummy as the default interface?
Before reloading alsa and restarting pulse - If you go into pavucontrol and change the input/output devices to your sound card, does the sound start working?
If that's the case, then you should be able to edit your pulse config to force your audio device to be default, regardless of whether or not the dummy is present.
(No idea about the dummy device, sorry)
I restarted my computer to check and if I run pavucontrol after starting, the only audio device listed is the dummy device. So I don't know if that's possible.
Ah, ok. I guess I misunderstood.
I'm afraid I don't have any other suggestions that haven't already been made elsewhere in the thread.
Best of luck, and I hope you get it figured out.
If it's just a matter of pulse selecting the wrong device I also had that issue and was able to work around it by adding a line to the end of my: /etc/pulse/default.pa
set-card-profile alsa_card.pci-0000_0e_00.3 output:analog-stereo+input:analog-stereo
You can get the correct name for your device with: pacmd list-sinks
While I have already found a working solution, I think the issue wasn't that it was selecting the wrong device. it was almost as if my normal audio devices didn't exist for some reason because nothing could see them, even my input devices were missing.
pulseaudio
Use PipeWire instead.
I am, wireplumber is part of pipewire.