Part #4: Sound on Artix with Wireplumber

In this final installment of this guide, we’ll be setting up a superior alternative to PulseAudio using PipeWire and WirePlumber on Artix Linux. This guide will walk you through the installation and configuration steps to achieve a fully functional sound system without the need for systemd or elogind.

Packages

We’re going to install these packages

doas pacman -S pipewire pipewire-dinit wireplumber wireplumber-dinit pipewire-alsa pipewire-jack

Once installed, let’s enable our 2 user services with dinit (DON’T run them as ROOT). If you haven’t setup the user services yet with dbus, follow my previous posts of this guide.

dinitctl enable pipewire
dinitctl enable wireplumber

Handle the lack of elogind

We need to disable some configs to support our elogind free system.

mkdir -p ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d
touch ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/80-disable-logind.conf

Then edit 80-disable-logind.conf and add

wireplumber.profiles = {
  main = {
    monitor.bluez.seat-monitoring = disabled
  }
}

Exit your session and login. You should see all the services running using dinitctl list. If all the services are up and running, you should now have sound on your system!

Usefull commands

You can check all your sources and more using

wpctl status

You’ll maybe want to change your default sink (input) and/or source (output), you can do so using

wpctl set-default ID

To get your current volume, run

wpctl get-volume @DEFAULT_AUDIO_SINK@

More info here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/WirePlumber.

Media support

To be able to pause a media and more, we’re going to install the playerctl package in the extra Arch Linux repository. If you don’t have setup this repository yet, follow this.

doas pacman -S playerctl

Now you’re able to use the playerctl commands such the pause command to pause the audio currently playing.

playerctl pause

Last words

I hope this series of posts helped you in your quest for a better system. There is still a lot for you to discover if you continue on your quest to use the almighty Linux. For any questions, feel free to reach out and keep yourself on the lookout for new posts written by yours truly. Happy tinkering!