On 01/10/2022 19:56, Michael wrote:
> Anyway, I ventured into pipewire because I wanted to see if Skype would work
> without pulseaudio and in this system it won't.  After I manually installed
> pipewire Skype won't access the microphone.  :-(

Maybe Skype uses ALSA? It's best to enable the "pipewire-alsa" USE flag 
on pipewire and disable the "pulseaudio" flag on alsa-plugins:

media-video/pipewire: pipewire-alsa
media-plugins/alsa-plugins: -pulseaudio

This replaces pulseaudio's ALSA plugin with pipewire's. Skype might work 
with  this.