Hi. I was alerted to this by Discord saying a new audio output option was available and did I want to switch. The new option - my spouse’s MacBook Pro. No. I do not want to use this as an audio output and never ever will. So I go into audio configuration and there it is.
Why would this happen, how do I remove it, and how do I prevent it from happening again? Appreciate any help you can provide or suggestions on where to look.
I’m running Fedora 43 on a Framework 13 AMD laptop.
I will guess the Macbook is paired and connected by Bluetooth? I see my PC on my laptop, and vice versa, when I’ve actually connected one to the other.
Not sure off the top of my head on how to keep the audio device from being included, or how to remove a detected audio device, but you should be able to turn it off in the GUI, This won’t remove it, but it does reduce the clutter a bit.
You may need to do some custom WirePlumber configuration. I looked at pavucontrol and pavucontrol-qtm but these have the exact same options as KDE’s settings, and don’t appear to hide them, just turn them off.
It is weird. I’ve never connected these two laptops before. The only connection is being on the same wifi network really. I’ll have to delve into pipewire I guess.
I’m finding KDE doing annoying stuff like this frustrating.
I assume pactl list | grep -i macbook shows the weird output, right? If so, this isn’t anything KDE did, it’s something the lower level PipeWire library is exposing.
What was your spouse doing with their computer in the moment it happened? Did they run some app that exports audio over the network or something?
OP is probably using one of the mechanisms to expose audio devices to the network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devices_with_computers_on_the_network maybe they installed some package in Fedora that enables the functionality by default causing this?
Well unfortunately or fortunately, that option has now disappeared on me. But thank you for replying and the starting point to look.
I don’t actually think she was using the laptop at all yesterday oddly, and since I only had the pop up from Discord this morning when I looked I don’t know exactly when this option appeared, but am guessing sometime overnight somehow. I haven’t installed any new packages in the last week or so that I can think of.
It looks like I’ll need to do a little more experimenting with both of these machines to find out what is going on here.
The exact same thing has happened to me. I just looked into audio devices, and an unknown laptop showed up. This was windows laptop i think, as it was labelled “[Name]’s Laptop“. Selecting that as audio output does not stop my music from playing in my laptop, but idk if it played on other laptop. I am on a LAN in university so i may never be able to know whom it belongs.
But I can confirm it is from Wifi/WLAN since Bluetooth and everything is disabled. If it was pipewire sharing audio devices, I wonder what mechanism is happening both on windows and mac that pipewire supports outputting into
Take a look at this :
Wow thank you! I’ll try this out and report back this week.
I don’t actually think she was using the laptop at all yesterday oddly
That can happen because wireplumber saves off sources and sinks that it sees into two files at ~/.local/state/wireplumber/{default-routes,default-nodes}
You can delete those 2 files and restart wireplumber and it will create fresh instances of those files. If the laptop doesn’t see that Mac connection over bluetooth, then that other laptop will be gone as a connection. But for permanently stopping that you’d want to use a configuration change to hide it
