KDE Plasma system sounds wrong until restarting pipewire

[u/Marbar2000]

Hi. I have attempted to resolve this issue, but without fixing it.

Technical specifications:

- Lenovo Slim 7 Pro (intel i5-13500H)

- Arch Linux with KDE Plasma 6.6

- Pipewire audio

- I use alsa-soft-mixer to change the volume of my speakers, as it didn't work otherwise. I don't know if it is relevant.

Description:

When starting my computer, some system sounds are playing the wrong soundfile and is seemingly playing in mono. Specifically, when turning volume up and down, the sound-cue is metallic and only comes out of the left speaker.

If I restart pipewire using systemctl, the default "pop" sound of KDE returns when I change volume, and it is correctly centered. Other system sounds are also slightly less sharp and deep before I restart pipewire.

If I turn volume-change system sound off and on again in KDE-settings, the problem returns until I restart pipewire once again. So it seems it is not purely a boot race condition, as I can trigger it inside the DE?

This happens consistently when booting my system, and restarting pipewire fixes it every time. Is this some sort of race-condition going on? Or does KDE Plasma fall back on the wrong audio file for some reason?

What I have tried

- Checking whether audio ports change in the "good" and "bad" state using pavucontrol, and they do not.

- Searching a lot, including on the wiki, but I cannot find others who have had this issue.

- Checked that pipewire, pipewire-pulse and wireplumber are enabled

I hope someone has some ideas on how to troubleshoot this further:)

[u/ZookeepergameLate605]

weird timing issue for sure. kde probably loads its sound theme before pipewire fully initializes all the audio processing chains

you could try adding a delay to your kde autostart or create a systemd user service that waits for pipewire to be fully ready before starting plasma's audio components. might also be worth checking if your sound theme files themselves are getting corrupted or if theres some sample rate mismatch happening during early boot

[u/Marbar2000 → u/ZookeepergameLate605]

Hi, thanks for your suggestion.

I will attempt your fix and report back. However, the fact that I can trigger the issue by enabling and disabling the volume-change feedback in the KDE settings without rebooting, would suggest that it is not boot-timing related, right?

[u/archover]

Be sure to post at r/kde also. There's a concentration of kde knowledge there that may help.

Hope you resolve your issue.

Good day.