How to Fix Audio Pop with Pipewire on Linux

This week I began using my laptop as a battlestation by connection external monitors, keyboard, mouse, microphone, and speakers. The only real headache was that every time I received a chat notification there was a loud popping sound from the speakers, then the audio playback, then another loud popping sound. A bit of searching turned up the root cause–power saving in the sound system–but finding the fix was a bit tricky.

Obvious Solutions that Don’t Work

There are a few obvious solutions that didn’t work for me. The first is to disable power-saving in the TLP daemon. However, running systemctl status tlp shows that there is no tlp.service enabled.

Several search results pointed to the module itself causing the popping, once again due to power-saving. However, when investigating the module, I found that power_save is already set to 0 for the snd_hda_intel module.

I also found several references to disable power-saving using an alsa-base.conf overlay file. However, using this approach had no effect.

Solution: Disable Alsa Power Saving Using Pipewire and Wireplumber

I found the solution through a combination of the Pipewire and Arch docs.

First, the example alsa configuration in the Pipewire docs shows how to set the suspend-timeout-seconds value. While the example shows a setting of 5, when researching the issue I previously discovered that setting it to 0 disables power-saving.

The Arch docs show how to add a Wireplumber overlay to set your preferred alsa values. We need to create a directory, then set the overlay file.

1. Create the Wireplumber directory

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d
   

2. Add the overlay file

   sudo touch /etc/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/disable-suspend.conf
   

3. Add configuration to the overlay file

   monitor.alsa.rules = [
     {
       matches = [
         # This matches the value of the 'node.name' property of the node.
         {
           node.name = "~alsa_output.*"
         }
       ]
       actions = {
         # Apply all the desired node specific settings here.
         update-props = {
           session.suspend-timeout-seconds = 0
         }
       }
     }
   ]
   

4. Restart Wireplumber

   systemctl --user restart wireplumber
   

You will hear a few pops when Wireplumber restarts (and when first booting your machine), but the pops at the beginning and end of each audio output will be resolved.

Tricky Configuration

This one was a bit tricky to track down, mostly because I was unable to find a default setting for this on the laptop itself. I would prefer that a default setting be easily found for each configurable option. Either that’s not how Wireplumber works, or I was just looking in the wrong place. But now I can work for hours on end with pop-free audio!