Have you removed the gstreamer cache to be sure the ranks are correctly recalculated? Try doing: rm ~/.cache/gstreamer-1.0/registry.x86_64.bin And then test gst-play again. Also, I'm preparing another patch that adds a configuration file for the pipewire gstreamer plugin so that the rank can be increased automatically by the pipewire-pulseaudio package by dropping a configuration file that modifies the default configuration without setting any environment variable.