Systems sounds played despite being muted (PipeWire, no PulseAudio)
(Originally reported against GNOME Shell at gitlab.gnome.org.)
Using Debian sid/unstable with GNOME Shell 40.5, I removed PulseAudio and only have PipeWire 0.3.38-2 installed. Despite having the system sounds muted in GNOME’s control center, they are still played. With PulseAudio installed, the sounds were correctly muted.
Forcing such a sound by for example pressing the left arrow key in GNOME Terminal, in the section Audio of the GNOME control center, the entry below quickly pops up.
PipeWire ALSA [gnome-shell]
Reply from Sebastian Keller:
That's a pipewire issue. The playback of system sounds in gnome-shell (or rather mutter in case of the bell) and other gnome components is done using libcanberra which sets the stream role to
"event"
. Apparently pipewire-pulse neither includes that role in its stream properties, because then it would not show up as a separate entry and it also does not apply the configured for that role.