Hi.
- Debian 13.
- KDE Plasma 6.3.6.
- A several-year-old HP All-in-one DP0xxx, Intel Core i7 10th generation processor.
- X11 because I do a lot of writing and Wayland appears to dislike clipboard utilities, but that’s a story for another day.
- And a browser called Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative made by the people who created Opera many years ago.
A couple of weeks ago, Vivaldi very suddenly stopped playing any kind of audio: Tidal, radio stations, stuff you find on Reddit. Anything. The rest of the system is not affected. I’ve played some radio via Clementine and some CD rips on the command line via SoX (Sound Exchange). And system sounds (notifications, etc.) still work. Firefox plays anything I feed it.
I am reading - without much comprehension - what the KDE Info Center’s “Audio” section has to say. I’ve learned that Source #59 (alsa-output.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo.monitor) and Source #60 (alsa-input.pci-0000_00_1f.3.analog-stereo) are suspended. So is Sink #59, which “always keeps at least one sink loaded even if it’s a null one”. This document lists modules, sink inputs, clients, and Card #48, with data on numerous outputs (maybe 40, including microphones, which I don’t use). It appears that Pipewire is the central control agent for all of these modules.
Nobody on Vivaldi’s hosted forum has been able to help (not for lack of trying). It’s a long shot, but I wonder if anybody here has insights into what might be going on. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to switch to Firefox, but I do enjoy Vivaldi a lot; it’s very customizable and until this incident has worked impeccably, and it also has an excellent email client built in.