Using pipewire causes APE to malfunction

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson Systems Jetson Orin Nano
1

Hello Nvidia team,

I have confirmed the APE sound card works find with pulsaudio.service. However, the pipewire doesn’t.

I do these steps to disable the pulseaudio and then enable the pipewire.

systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now stop pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket

systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber
systemctl --user --now start pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

Working:
Video of sound works

Not working:
Video of sound doesn’t work

You can see the sound bar always freeze when using pipewire. However, I can use arecord to capture my voice.

arecord -D hw:APE,0 -c 2 -r 48000 -f S16_LE -d 5 out.wav

I’m using the Jetpack 6.2 and the codec is rt5640 on our custom board. I also got some failure message from debug port.

[ 219.849458] tegra-asoc: sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: rt5640-playback-playback event failed: -22
[ 219.874519] rt5640 0-001c: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_hw_params on rt5640-aif1: -22
[ 219.874535] tegra-asoc: sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: rt5640-playback-capture event failed: -22
[ 220.554117] rt5640 0-001c: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_hw_params on rt5640-aif1: -22
[ 220.554133] tegra-asoc: sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: rt5640-playback-capture event failed: -22
[ 220.769787] rt5640 0-001c: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_hw_params on rt5640-aif1: -22
[ 220.769804] tegra-asoc: sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: rt5640-playback-playback event failed: -22
[ 220.790248] rt5640 0-001c: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_hw_params on rt5640-aif1: -22
[ 220.790258] tegra-asoc: sound: ASoC: PRE_PMU: rt5640-playback-capture event failed: -22

Do you have any idea on this problem?

3

Addition information…when I use the pipewire, there is no application can record my voice., such as Audacity, gnome-sound-record or guvcview. Only the arecord command works.

8

Hi Chang,

Apologies for the delay.

JetPack 6.2 ships PulseAudio as the default(Ubuntu 22.04 base). PipeWire is not part of the validated JP 6.2 audio stack on APE — switching to it is opt-in on your side and isn’t a configuration we officially test/support.

On the error: -EINVAL (-22) from rt5640_hw_params is most commonly hit when the negotiated bit format reaches the codec as S32_LE — the rt5640 driver only accepts 8/16/20/24-bit widths and returns -EINVAL for anything else. Your arecord uses S16_LE, which is supported, so the manual capture works as expected.
PipeWire/WirePlumber can briefly print these messages at startup while the graph re-probes formats.
To narrow this down, could you share:

  1. Whether the-22errors appear only at PipeWire start/restart, or also during active playback / capture (while the sound bar is frozen).

  2. amixer -c APE contents(oralsactl -f ape-before.state storeand... ape-after.state store) from two states:

    • while it’s still working under PulseAudio, and

    • right after switching to PipeWire (when it stops working).

The diff between the two mixer dumps will show whether WirePlumber is touching a routing/mux on the APE graph that breaks the path. Until we have that, the recommendation is to stay on the default PulseAudio stack for APE on JP 6.2.

9

Thank you for this reply.