cannot record from Pipewire after driver update.

I opened Audacity to record and when I tried to record, it came up with:

“Error opening recording device.
Errror code: -9997 Invalid sample rate.”

It was working fine yesterday, the only thing that changed since then and now is a firmware update using sudo pacman -Syu.

Pipewire is still only at version 0.3 (even the PipeWire API documentation is not yet complete). I expect that when it reaches version 1.0 it will work flawlessly with Audacity. It may be worth reporting the issue to Pipewire (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues) though it may not get much attention as Audacity does not yet officially support Pipewire.

from the bug report I sent to Pipewire, I heard that Audacity has a version with the JACK backend? Is there a package compiled for arch with it?

The 3.1.3 AppImage has Jack support compiled ib: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

…great. that’s not the only Linux version with jack support right?

The official “current release” versions from the Audacity team are published on the Audacity website: https://www.audacityteam.org/download/
They are also available from FossHub: https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity.html
and on GitHub: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

Old versions of the official Audacity releases are available:
On FossHub: https://www.fosshub.com/Audacity-old.html
and on GitHub: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases

I don’t recall exactly when Jack support was added to the AppImage, but versions before 3.0.5 did not support Jack.

Versions 3.1.1, 3.1.2, and 3.1.3 were mostly bug fix releases, so I’d not recommend using any 3.1.x version earlier than 3.1.3.

does the Arch package have jack?

I don’t know, I don’t use Arch. You will need to ask on the Arch forum. The Arch package is not made by the Audacity team.