Today is one of those days.

After running a normal Manjaro update on my Thinkpad T14s, audio was working like once. If stopped for too long or if the application that played audio was terminated, audio stopped completely for the entire system. The problem could be resolved by

systemctl --user restart pulseaudio

and closing all applications that were trying to play back audio. Then audio worked once again and shut down after the playback stopped.

To diagnose the issue, I stopped the PulseAudio service and ran

pulseaudio -v

While reproducing the issue, I found the following in the output:

I: [pulseaudio] module-suspend-on-idle.c: Sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.HiFi__hw_sofhdadsp__sink idle for too long, suspending ...

That pointed me in the right direction: Disabling the suspend-on-idle module finally did the trick for me. 🥲

It was a long time since I last had those problems with Linux. But hey, rolling releases. 🙃