Once again, I moved to ALSA

When I got a new computer a while ago I installed PulseAudio (PA) on it since I wanted to comfortably use USB headset and switching between it and my system soundcard. PA worked somehow fine but there where some problems with my favourite music player (Music On Console) but it could be to some degree mitigated with a patch.

Later Archlinux pushed PipeWire as hard dependency of few packages I had installed (namely kwin and PulseEffects). I can remove kwin safely since I do not use KDE/Plasma and had it for testing and as a backup, but it is really a pity that PulseEffects would be gone since it is great program to play with audio effects on the fly. So switching back to pulse would get rid me of these nice programs (unless I hack the packages which is another work, so why to bother?). The other huge issue with PipeWire is that it has some problems with playing audio.
When I start playing (or seek) some video it plays noise for a while until it catches up with something which is pain since PipeWire was advertised to me as a drop-in replacement for PA but it sucks even more.

So I decide to get rid of all that mess and use only ALSA. The basic switch was easy and almost none configuration was required. But I encountered 2 problems about which I wish to write about.

PulseAudio allows in its mixer to disable system sound which works nicely but ALSA does not have such feature (as long as I am aware of) and I have to disable sound effects for everything manually. In graphical session I use mostly Qt based programs and there was an annoying sound effect played whenever some pop-up window showed up. I searched hard and I was unable to find a solution on the internet and I found that Qt itself does not contain these audio effects and that they are part of some theme (or style), in my case it was part of Oxygen (maybe my configuration is somehow set up to use oxygen and I am not aware of that). After removing Oxygen from my system the sound effects are gone and silence returned.

All this I found after going almost mad and catching straws on the internet. My last straw which allowed me to fix this problem was that it should load “*.ogg” file so I started searching for such files and after few tries it bore fruits.

The search command I used is:

find /usr -iname "*\.ogg"

Second thing was default audio support in Wine which can be easily solved by running winetricks for given wine prefix.

winetricks settings sound=alsa