pavucontrol wouldn't start. Chasing it led from a WirePlumber Lua bug down to a USB protocol error
I tried to open pavucontrol to adjust the volume, and got this instead: pa_context_get_card_info_by_index() failed: Invalid argument Copy That’s it. It wouldn’t open. Environment: Arch Linux, sway, PipeWire 1.6.8, WirePlumber 0.5.16. It looked like the usual “the PulseAudio compatibility layer is in a mood” kind of problem. Once I actually started digging, it went deeper than expected. Start with journalctl Checking the logs via systemctl --user status pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber, both pipewire and wireplumber were spewing the same error every 3-5 seconds — and it was happening live, while I was investigating. ...