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Comment by jboynyc | Hacker News Reader

I recently made the switch in NixOS and found it pretty painless. Can't get my mic to work in Firefox though, and the other day I was looking through the manual trying to figure out how to use my HDMI screen's speakers rather than the built-in one and couldn't find the right incantation. Sounds like such rough corner cases will be a thing of the past soon. Congrats to the dev team!

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Assuming you're talking about Bluetooth mics: If you're using pipewire-media-session (for example, if you're on NixOS 21.11 instead of NixOS unstable), then profile autoswitching [0] is disabled by default, so you have to use pavucontrol to switch from A2DP to HSP. Profile autoswitching is enabled by default in WirePlumber, which is the default session manager in NixOS unstable as of a few days ago.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Automatic_profile_...

Wait what. I've desperately been waiting for this feature and now I learn it's already been there for a while (albeit disabled by default). ._.

(Kinda goes to show that enabling this feature by default is a good idea.)

Thanks, you just made my day!

You can still use pavucontrol for configuring in- and output devices per application.

That is how I have to manage the target output when Pipewire doesn't switch the audio to my Bluetooth headphones upon connection (sometimes it does). The confusing part is that the selected/target output in Settings->Sound on Pop!_OS continues to show as the headphones but the sound from the application, say Firefox, doesn't switch to that (clicking on Test works perfectly which is when I realized that the issue probably was not with Bluetooth/headphones but about per-app switching and tried pavucontrol which confirmed the doubts by showing Firefox output still going to analog stereo).

I wonder how your setup is different than mine. I also switched to Pipewire (some months ago) and I'm using NixOS and Arch Linux, and on both I could just change the audio output to my speakers on my monitors (via HDMI) with the usual device switch, same as before with just PulseAudio. Everything works perfectly.

https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/1c76775bbed80057cf54... https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/1c76775bbed80057cf54...

This is my pipewire config, does the job perfectly for me, tracking unstable.

Off topic, but I watched the ffmpeg args that go-chromecast used and scripted it. Now I preproces my videos and use catt.

You can detect when they're h264 and use - c:v copy for speediness.

I must admit I simply didn't realize the pulseaudio commands would still work. I figured they wouldn't because they were no longer installed after disabling pulseaudio and switching to pipewire. That's why I was trying to make things work with the pw-* commands and failing.

For the command-line folk:

  # mic on, worse audio quality
  pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.DE_AD_BE_EF_FA_CE headset-head-unit

  # mic off, better audio quality
  pactl set-card-profile bluez_card.DE_AD_BE_EF_FA_CE a2dp-sink

Sometimes, especially on intel platform, you need to configure the sound card to output HDMI audio instead of speakers/headphones. At least with pulseaudio (change sound card profile in pavucontrol's settings tab).

Have you tried different profiles for your hardware?

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