After upgrading from Debian 12 to 13, audio sounds really bad from my USB audio card, which is a Sound Blaster Play! 3.
The poor audio goes away immediately after launching pavucontrol, but this only lasts for a session; after a reboot, the issue returns. Nothing I've tried, short of launching pavucontrol, fixes the issue.
To address the issue of having to manually do this each reboot/login, I've added this to my AWM config:
awful.spawn.once("pavucontrol") This is a bearable work-around, but I still wish I didn't have to manually close that GUI after login. Sure, I could automate the closing of that too, but ** I'm hoping for a way to address this at a more fundamental level**.
Stuff I Tried :
Cleared old PulseAudio state with
rm -r ~/.config/pulse ~/.pulse, followed by a reboot or service restart—didn't help.Tried purging PulseAudio packages via
sudo apt purge pulseaudio, but it wasn't installed anyway.Reinstalled the PipeWire stack using
sudo apt update && sudo apt reinstall pipewire wireplumber pipewire-pulse pipewire-audio.Restarted PipeWire services right after with
systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber.Ran a full diagnostic script block (pw-dump, pactl lists, journalctl monitoring, pavucontrol launch, diffs, and log cats) to compare states before and after—it revealed leaked proxy errors and service restarts.
Reloaded the Awesome config after login (Mod4 + Ctrl + R) with that restart command in place, but audio still wasn't fixed.
Added a pavucontrol launch to the config with
awful.spawn.once("pavucontrol"), and that finally did the trick for fixing the audio on startup.
Update 2025-09-17: This problem has gotten worse. Now, not even launching pavucontrol makes the crackling audio cease. This same USB sound card (the Sound Blaster Play! 3) worked without issue prior to upgrading from Debian 12 to 13. Please advise my next steps.
pactl infohave the same effect? That is, just causing pipewire-pulse to start in general.pactl infodoesn't fix the audio distortion. Launchingpavucontrolis the only thing I've found that immediately removes all the audio distortion immediately.