Sxmo/Sound

From postmarketOS Wiki
< Sxmo
Note The following article concerns a temporary issue with PieWire and it will be fixed in near future.

By default, SXMO is delivered with PipeWire installed; however, PipeWire might not work well with all devices as of yet pmaports#1534, which means that sound volume may be significantly low and saturated "as if there were some too low gains as well as saturated ones on the sound path".

If your device is subjected to the audio issue as depicted above, please report about it on the issue tracker as it would accelerate the proper integration of PipeWire with SXMO and other postmarketOS variants.

This issue has been fixed for OnePlus6 and POCO F1 (see pmaports!4186); and there is a new solution which might keep PipeWire audio stable and might also fix low volume and crackling issues (see sdm845-mainline#48).

To get audio to perform better, it is advised to switch back to PulseAudio (SXMO supports ALSA, PulseAudio and PipeWire). You can do so by removing the constraint on PipeWire and installing PulseAudio instead:

 $ sudo apk add sxmo-utils-audio-pulseaudio
 $ sudo apk upgrade -a
 $ sudo alsaucm reload

If you use pmbootstrap to generate your image, you can add sxmo-utils-audio-pulseaudio to your extra packages, it will generate a correct image.