Using microphone input wrongly stuck in unplugged state

[eMPee584]

The previous week I was in a BBB meeting and while the internal laptop microphone worked initially, upon reloading the tab, it got stuck in the unplugged state. I could see in pavucontrol that it was still sensing noise just fine:

I could not find a way to force pipewire nor the pulseaudio backend I am using to override the state, so I was unable to speak in the conference as I didn't want to restart my computer. I'm not entirely sure it will reproduce but because I started hunting this down and found cubeb is what's handling audio devices in firefox, I thought I'd ask here, maybe someone has an idea or a debug option to force-use the input in case this happens again 😅

[kinetiknz]

Thanks for reporting this. Which Linux distribution are you using, and which version of PipeWire and WirePlumber is installed?

Once this issues occurs, I wonder if restarting the pipewire and wireplumber services would cause the correct state to be reported for this device. If so, that might provide you a workaround until this is fixed.

Given pavucontrol also shows the device as unplugged, this is likely a bug lower in the audio stack than cubeb. I'd suggest filing a bug against upstream to take this further.