Pipewire

2025-04-28

Fixing Thinkpad X220 microphone woes

So with my nice new DWM installation I waltz into a Jitsi meeting only to find that my microphone +wasn't working even though it appeared to. Something was missing in pulseaudio after I removed XFCE4, or +wasn't taken into account in DWM. Then I noticed that Librewolf was looking for Pipewire. What?

Eventually I got it working, but the microphone was distorted and full of parasites. +Adding a module remap to +turn the two laptop microphones into mono was a tad better but I decided go for the bleeding +edge and install Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio.

+sudo pacman -Rdd pulseaudio
+sudo pacman -S pipewire-{jack,alsa,pulse}
+systemctl --user enable --now pipewire pipewire-pulse pipewire-media-session
+

Noise suppression

+git clone https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice.git
+

Follow the instructions at Noise suppression for Voice

In order to change the default source:

+pactl list sources short
+pactl set-default-source rnnoise_source
+systemctl --user restart pipewire.service 
+

And that's the best I'll probably ever get out of the internal X220 microphones.

Why not just use Alsa? Because I use a bluetooth headset and noise suppression.

Why not just use an external microphone? I've ordered one :-)

+ +

Bluetooth Autoconnect

Just to add, Bluetooth Autoconnect was built for Pulseaudio but works fine with Pipewire.

Bluetooth autoconnect will connect any client that is paired and trusted, in my case a headset.

If you use Chaotic-Aur, pacman -S bluetooth-autoconnect will install it. Use yay -S bluetooth-autoconnect if not.

+ +