The last two upgrades have broken my audio setup.
First the options for Network Server and Network Access in paprefs were greyed out and my sinks disappeared after upgrading to bookworm. I just had to create a link to an existing file and it was working again but, it’s weird that it was needed in the first place. Pretty sure it has something to do with the change from pulseaudio to pipewire but I’m not very up to date on that subject and I just want to have my current setup to continue working.
Then yesterday I just launch a simple apt-get upgrade and after rebooting my sinks disappeared again. The network options in paprefs were still available, but changing them did nothing. I had to create the file ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/10-gsettings.conf and stuff it with “pulse.cmd = [ { cmd = “load-module” args = “module-gsettings” flags = [ “nofail” ] } ]” in order to have my sinks back.
I know it’s not only a Debian thing, as I can see this happening to people on Arch forums, but as Debian is supposed to be the “stable” one, I find it amusing that a simple upgrade can break your sound.
I got the same issue months ago, with Mint. I have a script to switch audio outputs, and it stopped working after… apt upgrade! Apparently what used to be called “hdmi-stereo” is now “hdmi-stereo-extra1”, no idea why.
In the case of my script, once I got what was going on, I solved it with a simple “if” statement:
if [[ $(pactl list sinks | grep extra) == "" ]] then declare -g mainProfile="hdmi-stereo" else declare -g mainProfile="hdmi-stereo-extra1" fi(My system uses pulseaudio. Don’t ask me why. I’m not touching it with a 3m pole.)