Sound issues PopOS – Pipewire

[innkeeper]

Hi guys I have weird problem with sound. After installing NoMachine deb package on my popOS laptop I have no sound on host, its not muted. Sound still goes through at the other end when I connect to my host machine but during or after I will disconnect NoMachine client I have no sound on host…I tried reinstalling NoMachine, Pipewire everything. I have no idea why audio stream keeps coming out only on the client side.

[kubaszym1]

Hi,

Please let me ask you a few questions so I can investigate your issue more efficiently.

Do you use the latest version of NoMachine (8.14.2)? If not, please upgrade to NoMachine 8.14.2.

Do you connect to the physical display or to the virtual desktop?

Do you mean that you don’t have any sound on your host immediately after installing NoMachine? And it doesn’t appear when you disconnect from the NoMachine session? Is the sound just constantly muted or is the entire audio system broken (that you don’t see any audio devices in the settings etc.)?

There’s a small chance that you experience some internal pipewire issues. Sometimes it’s enough to restart audio services:

systemctl --user --now restart pipewire.{service,socket}

You can also check the status of pipewire server:

systemctl --user --now status pipewire.service

Normally the sound should be muted on the server side during NoMachine session and after you disconnect it should unmute automatically. You can also unmute audio on the server during the connection. Click on the top-right corner of the NoMachine window to enter the session settings and then: Audio -> Change Settings -> Mute audio on the server.

Regards,

Kuba

[innkeeper]

Hi yes i have latest version, no physical display only laptop screen so no hdmi in use.

Sound was fine after installation but after first connection default setting of the client was to mute sound on host and so it did. Sound was coming out on client side. After i disconnected and raised volume on server side there was no sound. Restarted every service and reinstalled pipewire and wireplumber.

Thing is i see all audio devices so its not broken and there is grapcical indicator that sound is playing.

When i reconnect client to this server sound plays on client side from server. Muting/unmuting from client side does nothing.

 

 

[innkeeper]

Oookay I think I figured it out just now.

I was poking in alsamixer everything is on 100% (Master and Speakers) and unmuted  BUT there are channels with PGA names (PGA1.0 1Ma in my case). Looks like one of them was on 0%.

Seems like NoMachine client turns this chanel to 0% when muting sound but wont bring it up to 100% when unmuting.

I m going to do some research and tests but this fixed the issue. Not ideal but i can live with that.

 

Thank you

Keeper

[Monky Games]

I have the same problem on Ubuntu 24.04.

Installed NoMachine, connected a Macbook via NoMachine to my Linux Laptop.

Audio was piped to Macbook.

After disconnecting to Macbook, no sound on Linux.  I read through many forum posts and nothing worked.

Can you please show us what NoMachine does to pipewire on Linux so that I can manually revert whatever NoMachine did to corrupt my audio?

[kubaszym1]

Hi,

For now I can’t tell much but I managed to reproduce this issue on Ubuntu 24. It seems that there are some problems with unmuting PGA channels. We will investigate further.

For your information, NoMachine doesn’t mute audio using pipewire API. Instead, we use amixer functionalities to mute/unmute audio. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to capture audio properly.

You can try to fix manually but I’m not sure of the effect:

1) ls /dev/snd | grep controlC

example output: controlC0 – 0 is your card id

2) amixer -c <card-id> controls | grep “Playback Volume”

output: the channels to mute/unmute, i.e. numid=9,iface=MIXER,name=’Master Playback Volume’

3) example: amixer -c <card-id> cset numid=9 100% unmute

It should unmute numid 9 and set its volume to 100%. If you unmute all PGA channels this way, does the sound come back?

Best regards

Kuba

[Monky Games]

@Kuba, thank you so much.  Your instructions worked well.  I now have sound back!

Here is the output from <i>amixer -c 3 controls | grep “Playback Volume”</i>

• numid=9,iface=MIXER,name=’Master Playback Volume’
• numid=1,iface=MIXER,name=’Headphone Playback Volume’
• numid=35,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA1.0 1 Master Playback Volume’
• numid=46,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA30.0 30 Playback Volume’
• numid=47,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA31.0 31 Playback Volume’
• numid=38,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA7.0 7 Master Playback Volume’
• numid=39,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA8.0 8 Master Playback Volume’
• numid=40,iface=MIXER,name=’PGA9.0 9 Master Playback Volume’
• numid=3,iface=MIXER,name=’Speaker Playback Volume’

[kubaszym1]

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback.

I made a fix for this issue in our codebase, it will be available in the next release.

Best regards,

Kuba

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