Musescore AppImage sound issues on Fedora 39
I was just about to start writing an arrangement in Musescore 4.2 when sound-output stopped working in the application, thus rendering all attempts of getting some work done in vain. It doesn't need mentioning, but starting to work on a Sunday morning before 7 o'clock implies a certain sense of urgency. In fact the arrangement preferably has to be done today!
Anyway, on an OS level sound worked well in all applications but not in Musescore, also after a restart. The Musescore version from the package repository (which had different issues in the past, hence my usage of the AppImage) was encountering the same playback issues.
It had to be something else.
After my usual morning routine with plenty of coffee and checking in
on my feeds, I updated my packages and it seemed that the latest update
of pipewire might have caused the issue.
I had never done so before, but a downgrade of the package with dnf
downgrade pipewire fixed the issue for me. Great!
The procedure had been simple, though it took some time to read up. One only has to:
- check the DNF history with
dnf history - get detailed info about the last update with
dnf histoy info ID(where ID has to be replaced with the ID of the uptdate)
In the resulting output I then figured that PIPEWIRE had been updated, and likely (hopefully) was causing the issue. After the aforementioned downgrade-command sound started to work in Musescore again.
I don't know whether this is the best way to solve this issue but it did work for me and I am writing this also to have a place to look this up should a similar issue appear again. And maybe it might help someone else in the process.
This had been an hour than I will never get back, but I learned something new in the process, thus it wasn't wasted time, but a learning-experience. And yes, the arrangement is "almost" done, and now it is time for pizza.
Update 2024-02-05: It seems that the latest update to Pipewire has fixed the issue. At the least after the latest update, Musescore still works.