Pacmd - No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon

Help
1

I have recently setup nixos with awesomewm where i have a component that controls sound via pacmd. However, the problem when trying to execute pacmd is that i haven’t been able to get it to work with Pipewire.

Here are my nix configs:

  # Enable sound with pipewire.
  sound.enable = false;
  hardware.pulseaudio.enable = false;
  services.pipewire = {
    enable = true;
    alsa.enable = true;
    alsa.support32Bit = true;
    pulse.enable = true;
    # If you want to use JACK applications, uncomment this
    #jack.enable = true;

    # use the example session manager (no others are packaged yet so this is enabled by default,
    # no need to redefine it in your config for now)
    #media-session.enable = true;
  };
  systemd.user.services.pipewire-pulse.path = [ pkgs.pulseaudio ];

I know about alternatives such as amixer but i’d like to get pacmd to work as well. Since pipewire promises seemless pulseaudio emulation, i would expect this to make tools like pacmd to work.

What does pacmd expect in terms of configs to work with pipewire?

2

What is broken exactly? Does not work is not much information to work with.

3

The error that i am seeing was mentioned in the title. Whenever i invoke pacmd list it would show me the following error:

No PulseAudio daemon running, or not running as session daemon
4

Is systemctl status --user pipewire-pulse.service outputing anything not normal?

Did you logout and back in after enabling pipewire?

5

Nothing out of the ordinary:

systemctl status --user pipewire-pulse.service
● pipewire-pulse.service - PipeWire PulseAudio
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/user/pipewire-pulse.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
    Drop-In: /nix/store/l8a14whvgzzhqyd69bdj4q3wn767giz3-user-units/pipewire-pulse.service.d
             └─overrides.conf
     Active: active (running) since Wed 2022-08-03 10:59:08 EEST; 13h ago
TriggeredBy: ● pipewire-pulse.socket
   Main PID: 2294 (pipewire-pulse)
      Tasks: 2 (limit: 76848)
     Memory: 12.9M
        CPU: 7.587s
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/session.slice/pipewire-pulse.service
             └─2294 /nix/store/gqj9l3msz45m02a0fmh19377mxiszzay-pipewire-0.3.51-pulse/bin/pipewire-pulse

Aug 03 10:59:08 nixos systemd[1657]: Started PipeWire PulseAudio.
Aug 03 10:59:08 nixos pipewire-pulse[2299]: 536870912

And yes, i’ve rebooted many times.

I tried adding pulseaudio to systemPackages so that i can have pacmd available and also tried using nix-shell -p pulseaudio to no avail.