Start Easyeffects before having played any audio = silence

[Shallrath]

Hi,

I want to keep easyeffects running in background when I'm logged in. Therefor, I have added easyeffects --gapplication-service to the startup script of my WM (fluxbox). Whenever I log in, easyeffects is running in background, but when I play some audio, I can't hear anything. I need to kill and restart easyeffects and then it works fine.

After some experimenting, I found out that easyeffects must be started after some audio has been played to work properly. This is not very nice because it can't be autostarted. Is there a workaround?

Another oddity I noticed is that when starting easyeffects before having played any audio, I can see easyeffects-sink as an output device in the mixer and theVU-meter of it is indicating playback. The VU-meter of my soundcard stays at zero. If I start easyeffects after already having played audio before, easyeffects' VU-meter stays at zero and my soundcard shows a signal. Then I can hear it and I can hear that it is being processed by easyeffects.

I think this might be related that pipewire is started implicitly by a socket when audio is played and that easyeffects is not starting pipewire properly so an audio playback needs to start it first?

[wwmm]

Is there a workaround?

It is the first time I hear about that. In the past a kde user was having a weird problem where kde was initializing our autostart file located at ~/.config/autostart/ way before Pipewire was fully initialized. As a result EasyEffects was loaded in a broken state. Maybe something similar is happening in your fluxbox installation.

In the end we never found out why that was happening to a specific kde user. Others did not have the problem. The solution he found at the time was delaying the autostart. I do not remember how he did that. Is fluxbox fully initializing PipeWire in the login phase or is this happening only on demand when an audio player plays something?

[wwmm]

If you run easyeffects --gapplication-service in a terminal does it work? Or does it fail only when executed by the DM in the login?

[Shallrath]

Starting easyeffects from terminal or through ~/.fluxbox/startup both gives the same result.

I removed everything audio-related from ~/.fluxbox/startup and did a reboot.

I started easyeffects with debug logging and played some music. Nothing was audible. Pavucontrol showed signal in the easyeffects-sink and not in my soundcard.
1.log

Then I killed easyeffects, started it again and played music again. Music was audible and the Equalizer of easyeffects was audibly working. Now, the signal appears in my soundcard and not in easyeffects-sink anymore.
2.log

[wwmm]

Looking at your logs I see some problems

pipe_manager: new metadata property: 0, default.configured.audio.sink, Spa:String:JSON, { "name": "easyeffects_sink" }
pipe_manager: Audio/Sink 44 alsa_output.pci-0000_01_00.1.hdmi-stereo-extra2 was added
pipe_manager: Audio/Sink 46 alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.iec958-stereo was added
...
soe:  link from node 67 to output device 4294967295 failed

I have seen PipeWire doing this in the past in some users installations. I do not really know why it happens. Before notifying us about your sound card devices PipeWire is telling us that our own virtual device is the default device. In the end what happens is that we do not know where we should send audio. That is why the line starting with soe fails. The id 4294967295 is telling that we do not know where to send audio to.

Something you can try to going to this configuration window

, uncheck Use Default Output and select your output device manually. The harder solution would be to try to force PipeWire to somehow load real devices before virtual devices. This way your hardware would probably be the default and we would see this.

[Shallrath]

PipeWire is telling us that our own virtual device is the default device

That was the critical hint. After installing Easyeffects, I wanted to make sure that all applications use this sink instead of the sound card directly, bypassing Easyeffects. So I set the easyeffects-sink to be the fallback device in pavucontrol.

I changed it back for my sound card to be the fallback device and now Easyeffects is working correctly when only started once. Verifyed after a reboot.

@wwmm Thank you very much for your immediate and patient support and of course for Easyeffects 🥇

[wwmm]

Oh! I see. I am glad it is working now. Lots of people do that. But in reality EasyEffects(and PulseEffects) is designed assuming that your hardware is the default device. The only cases where you really need to set our virtual devices as default is when you use audio applications that ask PipeWire/Pulseaudio to not allow their streams to be managed. But as you saw it isn't a workaround for everybody. Sometimes it happens what happened to you.

[wwmm]

I think this might be related that pipewire is started implicitly by a socket when audio is played and that easyeffects is not starting pipewire properly so an audio playback needs to start it first?

At least on GNOME PipeWire is fully working by the time my login finishes. If there is some kind of socket activation Gnome is forcing it to happen very early.