browser audio pipewire/wireplumber sink! | Arch Linux Community | Page 1

hello! trying to finally figure this out LOL and putting in a thread for cleanliness

i'm on arch with pipewire. pipewire splits application audio by stream or audio source instead of by program or binary - as an example, a page on my browser that has multiple audio clips will have multiple audio sliders in my volume mixer instead of one combined one like on Windows.

someone here previously informed me that i could resolve this issue by routing my browser audio to a virtual sink, where i can then route that sink to a loopback and connect the loopback to my main audio output device, in one big chain. we succeeded in setting up the pipewire resources (sink and loopback) and creating them on boot, but the wiring between these resources and my audio output is still not quite there.

ExecStart=/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=zen-sink
ExecStart=/usr/bin/pactl load-module module-loopback source="zen-sink.monitor" sink="alsa_output.usb-Focusrite_Scarlett_2i2_USB-00.analog-stereo" latency_msec=1

looking through qpwgraph, it is to my experience where both my sink and loopback are feeding directly into my output, and the sink acts as basically an amplifier to my normal audio output - if i let it at 100%, my resulting audio is basically doubled in volume, and muting the sink brings it back down to 100%.

my browser also fails to automatically map to zen-sink - it goes to my output, and i have to manually change it to the sink.

can i ask for some help in debugging what's gone wrong? i must be missing just one little thing somewhere - i also don't really know how to use qpwgraph so im unsure if rerouting the devices through the GUI and saving it will apply as i wish it to apply and also save between reboots (the screenshot below being the current setup, not the target setup (i dont know what the target setup really should look like in qpwgraph anyways LOL))

~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/50-zen-sink.conf:

pulse.rules = [
  {
    matches = [
      {
        application.process.binary = "zen"
      }
    ]
    actions = {
      update-props = {
        node.target = "zen-sink"
      }
    }
  }
]

#browser audio pipewire/wireplumber sink!