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Audio Notes ​

OpenAL device selection and PipeWire/JACK ​

We have seen intermittent segfaults in the PipeWire JACK shim when running audio alongside other players (e.g. Spotify). The backtrace shows the crash in the pw-data-loop thread inside libjack.so.0 via OpenAL.

To avoid binding to the unstable JACK backend, the engine now:

  • Sets ALSOFT_DRIVERS=pulse,alsa at startup if it is not already set.
  • Prefers OpenAL devices containing pulse, then pipewire, then alsa.
  • Allows explicit override via SPACE_AUDIO_DEVICE.

This keeps audio working out of the box on common Linux setups while avoiding the PipeWire JACK shim. If you need JACK specifically (e.g. a JACK-only system), set ALSOFT_DRIVERS or SPACE_AUDIO_DEVICE before launching.

Example overrides:

sh
ALSOFT_DRIVERS=jack ./build/space -m main
SPACE_AUDIO_DEVICE="JACK Audio Connection Kit" ./build/space -m main