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PipeWire: A server for Linux audio and video streams

531 points by sandebert 5y ago

dralley 5y ago
They have one of the best / most comprehensive FAQs I've ever seen. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ
squarefoot 5y ago
Patiently waiting for Linux to have one audio server that will offer compatibility to all previous ones (that is, all software requiring other audio systems such as oss, alsa, PA, Jack, etc. will be handled gracefully without installing them) while encouraging direct support for new apps, then slowly phasing them out until we have a consistent, possibly layered, low latency audio stack that scales from small single board computers to full sized audio workstations. Choice is a good thing, but too much of it can have negative effects by slowing development and porting down (see window/desktop managers).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kevincox 5y ago
  PipeWire is aiming, and positioned to be this service. I don't have a particular case for low-latency audio so I can't comment on that but it is amazing that you can use pavucontrol to tweak your device configuration and volumes then use qjackctl to wire the devices however you want. I'm impressed at how well it works and it even supports better bluetooth codecs than pulseaudio does. It has already shipped by default in Fedora and is available in Arch and NixOS. It does look like it will quickly wipe out PulseAudio by default. I'm sure Jack and ALSA will hang in there longer but they are already used much more rarely (by users, the ALSA API will stick around for decades more I'm sure).
- boudin 5y ago
  Pipewire is implementing Alsa, Pulse Audio and Jack already. I don't think alsa is going away but I can see Pulse Audio and Jack being replaced by it quite quickly.
  - spijdar 5y ago
    I don't think ALSA and Pipewire fill the same niche anyway? I was under the impression ALSA was an API for directly talking to the audio devices, which would be used by Pipewire or Pulseaudio or that in-house solution ChromeOS uses, or whichever flavor of mixer. End-user applications talking directly to ALSA will probably become more uncommon, though. Edit: Yeah, the PipeWire FAQ confirms this https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#does-pipewire-replace-alsa https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
    - jabl 5y ago
      Pipewire indeed doesn't replace ALSA, but it provides the ALSA API, allowing applications coded against the ALSA API to use pipewire.
      - eredengrin 5y ago
        Ah this is very cool to hear, thanks for the clarification.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        I wonder, problems with PA emulating ALSA were AFAIK always blamed on apps abusing ALSA APIs. Does Pipewire do a better job of emulating ALSA than PA did, or does Pipewire just rely on the fixes installed to make those ALSA apps start to work OK on PA?
        jabl 5y ago
        I'm not familiar with the details of this topic, sorry. I believe PA did (or still does) publish guidelines for a 'safe' subset of the ALSA API. Don't know if Pipewire has published something similar, but I would guess there are corner cases in the ALSA API that wouldn't work well on top of Pipewire. E.g. the buffer rewinding, considering that Pipewire is explicitly designed around never doing that.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  To be a bit more on the nose than the other replies? Did you read past the headline at all? This is perhaps one of the best examples of not just making a new standard, but making one implementation to rule them all and implementing all the competing standards. > Patiently waiting for Linux to have one audio server that will offer compatibility to all previous ones That's PipeWire! > then slowly phasing them out until we have a consistent, possibly layered, low latency audio stack that scales from small single board computers to full sized audio workstations. Does PipeWire have its own interface for applications yet? I haven't heard of it if so. That's good; let everything maranate for a while before trying to design the "one, true interface".
- ptx 5y ago
  Interestingly, FreeBSD and Linux both started with the same audio stack (OSS) and both rewrote it twice[1], but FreeBSD has kept the original OSS API while adding essentially the same features, it seems. The big selling-point of ALSA, from what I remember, was that OSS couldn't provide mixing to support multiple applications - but FreeBSD's OSS does that. Some of the main selling-points of PulseAudio are per-application volume, low latency and high-quality resampling, all of which FreeBSD's OSS claims to do as well. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound
  - rofrol 5y ago
    The same features? Interesting. Hiw about bluetooth audio? Support for wayland?
    - nsajko 5y ago
      Wayland is Linux-only.
      - fgrsnau 5y ago
        Not true: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland I run sway on FreeBSD and haven’t observed problems.
satyanash 5y ago
the transition from pulseaudio -> pipewire was pretty matter-of-fact. A great example of things done right.
lambdaba 5y ago
PipeWire completely removed lag on bluetooth audio for me, which was a nice unexpected surprise.
- davidandgoliath 5y ago
  I'm in regardless (being I use fedora), but this cements it if that's the case.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I don't have that experience (using AAC, that is), but I do enjoy being able to select the Bluetooth audio codec with Pipewire (SBC, AAC, SBC-XQ, mSBC, etc.). The array of supported and configurable Bluetooth codecs are the reason I switched. Now I can use AAC for music, SBC-XQ for video and interactive content and switch to mSBC when I need to make a call, all from the user interface.
captn3m0 5y ago
Pipewire is great, but it is sadly lacking in end-user documentation. With pulseaudio, if something broke or needed tweaking - I had thousands of forum posts to go through. Even the Arch Wiki has a PulseAudio/Troubleshooting section with various configuration suggestions. For Pipewire, there is no end-user documentation that I've found so far. On one my setups, and all media stops playing, including videos if I forget to plug in my headphone. Restarting pipewire or plugging in devices after that doesn't seem to help, and I have no idea about the pipewire configuration files to even attempt any changes. I would really appreciate some end user debugging and configuration related documents.
- eloeffler 5y ago
  I haven't used it yet, but could it be that you haven't checked for a while? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Troubleshooting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Troubleshooting There are a couple of sections there
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    Nopes, I’ve tried most of this already.
- prvc 5y ago
  >With pulseaudio, if something broke or needed tweaking >I had thousands of forum posts to go through. That points to what sounds like two disadvantages, if anything.
  - captn3m0 5y ago
    That was part of my point - PA’s troubleshooting/tweaking experience was terrible, but it was still feasible.
    - prvc 5y ago
      If you were to experience a novel or rare problem with PulseAudio, you would be in the same boat. The likelihood of a user encountering a problem is more apt than assuming as a given that you're dealing with a problem.
wmanley 5y ago
See also some background in this LWN article: https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/
WD-42 5y ago
The migration to Pipewire has already begun. It is the default option in Arch, at least if you use the new arch-install script.
- figomore 5y ago
  It’s the default at Fedora too. I’ve been using it at NixOS without any problem.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Does it work well with 21.05 or are you in unstable?
stncls 5y ago
For the last ~12 years, I gave PulseAudio a try every time I upgraded the Fedora distro on my main computers. I almost never had the catastrophic bugs many people complained about. But pulseaudio has always taken 10-15% of one CPU when in use (be it on audio/video calls, or music/movie playback). This is across 3 different laptops and 2 desktops. It is not a huge deal, but it is a bit frustrating on laptops where battery life is precious. I understand that PulseAudio is very powerful, but it represented no practical gain for me personally, with my very simple use cases, so I simply disabled it. Weirdly, I found very few people complaining about PulseAudio's CPU usage. Maybe nobody cares about 10-15% of one core. However, I am happy to report that PipeWire seems to not have this problem at all. Since it became default on Fedora, it has barely shown on top's first page. Given that it is even more ambitious than PulseAudio in terms of latency, this is incredibly impressive!
- stncls 5y ago
  Note that PipeWire was initiated by Wim Taymans, one of the driving forces behind GStreamer. I think it is one case of the right people in charge of the right projects :-).
- timvisee 5y ago
  Yes! I experienced the same. Just never publicly complained about it. It's the only constant running thing having high CPU. PipeWire, though still somewhat power hungry, is a lot better.
- earthbee 5y ago
  Are there any particular circumstance where it takes 10-15% of one CPU for you or is it whenever there is sound playing? I just checked mine while playing music on YouTube and it bounces between 4.0 and 4.8%
  - stncls 5y ago
    Whenever there is sound playing or recording. I think it was lower than 10-15% on my most recent desktop, so maybe 4-5% makes sense if your computer is powerful. (While I fully appreciate that it is a very minor annoyance, 5% still frustrates me because PulseAudio added no value to me. I also understand that it added features very useful to other people.)
xrd 5y ago
As others have commented, the documentation is not there yet. I've never had good experiences trying to switch from pulse to pipe. It sounds like some distros are using as the starting point for new installs, like Arch. Is this the best way, to just install a new distro from scratch. I just don't want to try to hack a bunch of configuration files from pulse. If so, what's the best distro offering pipewire. It seems like a revolutionary change and I'm excited to use it.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Fedora uses pipewire. Try LiveCD image.
- majewsky 5y ago
  > I just don't want to try to hack a bunch of configuration files from pulse. When I migrated from PulseAudio to PipeWire, I started by deleting all PulseAudio packages and installing the PipeWire packages. Then I rebooted and as it turns out, I was done. No fiddling with config files required here. Everything worked immediately.
  - xrd 5y ago
    Interesting. What distribution are you using? This is a great idea.
kfajdsl 5y ago
I switched over from pulseaudio to pipewire last week, and I can say it just works (tm), which is the highest praise I can give something like this as a non-power-user.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  I also did, because pulseaudio was giving me weird sound issues (although they are probably because of Bluetooth to be honest). But I found out about pulsewire and after switching, it just works, so... Plan on keeping using it.
mlang23 5y ago
PulseAudio was and is the disaster that the LAD community has already predicted. Whenever a package manager forced it onto me, I had to figure out how to get rid of it again. Hopefully PieWire will improve things.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  In my experience, the Manjaro and Ubuntu package managers make the PipeWire packages "provide" the necessary PulseAudio metapackages to avoid dependency issues. I guess that means even if you don't plan to switch, installing PipeWire right now may help you prevent your package manager from installing Pulse as a dependency.
josteink 5y ago
I’d love to try it out, but for the time being I’m running Ubuntu (for work needs) and there doesn’t seem to be any trivial/non-invasive ways to get PipeWire to run on a regular Ubuntu desktop install. Maybe it makes it to next LTS as an apt-gettable option? I’ll keep my hopes up :)
- jabl 5y ago
  Last I checked, they are seriously investigating switching to pipewire for the upcoming 21.10 release.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Ubuntu has been burned by adopting pulseaudio too early. I've had many problems in 2008 and still have some today. They will probably be more conservative when switching this time.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I don't know about any LTS versions, but 21.04 has pipewire in the standard repo. I expect PW to be in the 22.04 LTS based on that, but I don't expect it to be the default any time soon. This PPA [0] works fine for me in 21.04 to get the latest version. Support for the PPA seems to go back to Bionic, so you should be able to use it on recent LTS versions of Ubuntu as well. The only annoying part of the whole process is that the migration requires running a bunch of commands to stop and mask PulseAudio and to enable pipewire. This guide [1] worked great for me. [0]: https://launchpad.net/~pipewire-debian/+archive/ubuntu/pipewire-upstream https://launchpad.net/~pipewire-debian/+archive/ubuntu/pipew... [1]: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/05/enable-pipewire-audio-service-ubuntu-21-04/ https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/05/enable-pipewire...
  - josteink 5y ago
    I'll be damned. That guide actually worked for me. Thanks for the heads up :)
mixmastamyk 5y ago
I tried to hook up a midi keyboard to a raspberry pi, for my kid to practice piano but it didn’t work well. Was Ubuntu Mate with timidity soft synth. Latency was about half a second from key press to sound which made it unplayable. Not sure what else could be done but hopefully this project is a solution.
- cjaybo 5y ago
  I haven't tried it but you might look into AVLinux, it's supposed to be more real-time performance friendly.
- ta988 5y ago
  it could be yes, but there are a lot of variables to take into account here. what audio system were you using what were the settings.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Whatever is standard with ubuntu, pulse audio with defaults I believe. At some point I installed jack but it didnt seem to help. I gave up as several hours were all I had to spare. :-/
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I use an RPi4 for a high end self-built e-piano (StudioLogic weighted key controller, Pianoteq for synthesis, ART monitors, HifiBerry pro-audio DAC). Latency is fine, but you won't get the same results with stock Ubuntu Mate. The "solutions" don't involve Pipewire per se, although in the future that might be the technology in use.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    I don’t understand what is “stock” in this scenario.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
ta988 5y ago
I've replaced jack by pipewire for all my audio work. It works pretty well, still a few xruns occasionally but it has been really transparent with pw-jack and reduced a lot the various crashes I would see with jackthat would kick all the clients from time to time.
commoner 5y ago
PipeWire is how audio should be on Linux, and it's ready to use. No more complications between PulseAudio, ALSA, and JACK. PipeWire implements all 3 of these interfaces, which means you can use applications that depend on any or all of these interfaces simultaneously with no conflicts. Playing a video in Firefox and a track in a digital audio workstation at the same time works with no special configuration. PipeWire makes audio on Linux as easy as it is on other OSes. The Arch Wiki page describes some of the use cases for PipeWire: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire
- marcodiego 5y ago
  It is a shame it took so long but it is finally here. The feeling may be similar to when pulseaudio arrived, but it is not the same thing; Pipewire implements everything that is needed; users will no longer need to care about handoff between alsa, pulseaudio and jack. It manages video streams too and the latest version of OBS even makes use of it to allow screen sharing on wayland running from flatpak. Finally! I've been watching linux since the OSS days. I used oss, alsa, arts, esd, jack, pulseaudio... never it has been looking as well aimed as it is this time. Finally!
  - buu700 5y ago
    I haven't read the article yet, but how big a deal is this? Is this something that distros are likely to adopt on top of or in place of PulseAudio? Does this make any existing part of the Linux audio stack/ecosystem redundant, or is it strictly solving a problem (or problems) that had yet to be addressed?
    - necubi 5y ago
      Yes, it replaces PulseAudio and Jack. Its goal is to provide a single audio daemon that can serve both consumer applications (where power consumption is typically most important) and pro applications (where latency is most important). Currently those are served by PulseAudio and Jack, so it's very exciting to have a single service that can cover both use cases. It also replaces part of ALSA, which is two things: the kernel interface to talk to audio devices, and a set of user libraries on top of that interface. PipeWire still uses the former, but has its own, better API for the latter (in addition to supporting ALSA, PulseAudio, and Jack APIs).
bananaoomarang 5y ago
Switched to pipewire last year at some point and it has been remarkably pain free. Bluetooth support seems more robust (no more weird 'have to reboot my computer to connect to these headphones for some reason') but the real headline feature is I no longer have to screw around to get pulseaudio and jack to coexist peacefully (nigh on impossible in my experience)
marcodiego 5y ago
Wanted to try debian 11 last weekend. First time I installed it from debootstrap. I plugged in a 1TB SSD on an USB 2.0 to SATA case, formatted it, prepared the root filesystem with debootstrap, chrooted to it, installed a bunch of packages, setup locale and timezone, installed linux-image, grub and booted it. Worked flawlessly. Tried a "ps|aux" and discovered it is already running wayland and pipewire. Works so well it is boring. Nice!
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  This has been my experience with Wayland/Pipewire - Things just work. I've been blown away by how good things like touchpad/gesture/multi-monitor support are in Wayland as well. I tried really, really hard to run linux on a laptop in 2010, and eventually just settled on virtualizing it for acceptable device compatibility. In 2020, my linux laptop genuinely feels much better than the macbook my office issued me. Like - actually better. Not "Better because I control it and it's free/opensource", just "Better".
  - vegai_ 5y ago
    >In 2020, my linux laptop genuinely feels much better than the macbook my office issued me. Like - actually better. Not "Better because I control it and it's free/opensource", just "Better". Yes! This is the point of Linux and other open source. We don't use open source because it's "morally better", we use it because it consistently produces superior solutions.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > We don't use open source because it's "morally better", we use it because it consistently produces superior solutions. Why not both?
bryanmikaelian 5y ago
PipeWire was the only way I could get AirPod Pros to work in headset mode. With pulseaudio, it was rabbit hole after rabbit hole only to find a solution that ended up not working. I switched a few weeks ago and haven’t looked back.
OJFord 5y ago
I've found the AV sync considerably off watching Youtube videos in Firefox with Bluetooth earphones (not tried other combinations) since switching to Pipewire. It's not something I do enough that I was bothered to switch back to Pulseaudio, and haven't really dug into it yet. But while it's mentioned here.. anyone else have that, or know what it might be?
- EvanDotPro 5y ago
  I use Bluetooth ear buds (OnePlus Buds) daily on Fedora with Pipewire and haven't noticed any perceivable sync issues myself. Edit: Other comments are mentioning codec selection for Bluetooth in relation to lag/sync issues. I'm using whatever is default on Fedora 34. I've never looked and am not at my computer to check right now unfortunately.
lom 5y ago
When I first tried it a year ago, it worked for some time until some update that broke my headphones. Half a year ago, when I installed another distro I gave it another shot and it worked OOTB. But unfortunately a month ago my headphones stopped working. But they still/always worked in pulseaudio. There seem to be a few issues with my symptoms, yet the maintainers haven’t fixed the regression yet… Until then I’ll be having to use pulse
EvanDotPro 5y ago
Long time daily Fedora user here. PipeWire is what we've needed for so long in terms of audio, not to mention more recently in terms of screen capture with Wayland. The only issue I've run into is that for some apps (Zoom, Firefox, Chrome) which are set to use my "default audio device" for input or output, it selects the correct device initially, but if I change the default/system device (via gnome sound settings) later while it's in use, most (all?) of the time, the application continues using whatever device was selected initially. I haven't bothered to debug or see if this is a known issue as it hasn't bothered me much since most apps allow switching to explicit input/output devices which works fine. I believe (but haven't definitively confirmed) that changes via pavucontrol also work, so perhaps it's something with the gnome sound settings? Anyway, huge thanks to the devs who put their time, effort, experience, and talent into making PipeWire happen. It's a huge step forward on multiple fronts
- preek 5y ago
  I have the same issue with PulseAudio and Zoom and it’s always been like this this.
jagger27 5y ago
I find it beautiful that the LDAC codec used with Sony wireless Bluetooth headphones only works on Linux through PipeWire. macOS is stuck with AAC, and Windows gets aptX. Linux gets all of them. Who do I thank for making this Just Work?
- SSLy 5y ago
  Probably EHfive for their pioneering work on integrating those into PA/bluez https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Let it be officiated here if not already: The $350 WH-1000XM4 has invariably higher-bandwith, higher-resolution audio than the $500+ Airpods Max. Whoever set that price at Apple is squirming in their seat, I can't seem to find it being sold new for more than $550.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    This is part of the reason why I returned my AirPods Max two days after trying them out and stuck with my Sony WH-100XM4s. Even though the AirPods were better for quick switching between devices, have a better voice chat experience, and have better noise cancellation, they don't universally sound better. I wasn't impressed at all by the sound quality. They also clamp extremely hard on my big head compared to the Sonys. The lack of comfort on such expensive cans is a big deal breaker. I'm keeping a close eye on what Sony does next, because most of what they're doing now is really good.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Does this Sony thing phone home, or demand other concessions? I bought Audio Technica phones sometime back. The pads have burst twice. Now all the active features are dead. I had sworn off Sony products because they always quit working after a year. Do they still do this? I felt like I was just renting.
    - 5y ago
pshirshov 5y ago
Out of curiosity: I believe that pipewire was supposed to solve the remote desktop problem for wayland. I mean real RDP, not VNC. What's the situation with RDP on wayland?
- mindwok 5y ago
  Depends on what desktop environment (Compositor, specifically) you're using. Gnome (Mutter) has RDP support built in but the documentation is pretty scarce and it only has a CLI interface. I'm not aware of any other distros with RDP support over Wayland, they mostly only use VNC.
mr_sturd 5y ago
I moved from PulseAudio to SnapCast for streaming audio over my local network as it was easier to configure multiple sinks for multi-room audio. It looks as though there is support for similar with PipeWire, with the ROC sink and ROC source modules[0][1]. I'm going to have to set aside some time to have a poke around with this and see how it performs. [0] - https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_sink.html https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_sink.html [1] - https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_source.html https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_source.html
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Do you have documentation or any blog post on your setup? Lsat I tried snapcast, it worked, but eventually had too much lag between nodes. And there is no UI bundled by default, so I was wondering what the most mature frontend would be.
  - radus 5y ago
    Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but I use Snapcast to stream from a record player to anywhere on the network [1]. Snapweb [2] works really well but has some issues on iOS currently. Some alternative clients are listed on the main repo [3]. 1: https://radusuciu.com/posts/wireless-vinyl/ https://radusuciu.com/posts/wireless-vinyl/ 2: https://github.com/badaix/snapweb https://github.com/badaix/snapweb 3: https://github.com/badaix/snapcast#contributions https://github.com/badaix/snapcast#contributions
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    Snap let's you set latency for nodes, so you can tweak timings.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  I’d appreciate any notes on your experiences doing this, even in a trashy pastebin dump. I briefly looked at this but didn’t have time to implement it correctly, and suspect there’ll be a few gotchtas given the relatively baby age of the project
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Podman + Pipewire (and soon Wireplumber), two things to love about Fedora.
Venn1 5y ago
PipeWire is a fantastic bit of software and it's great on the desktop. I would play around with it in the studio but it lacks a netjack2 equivalent. zita-n2j is not a replacement since it requires the client to have audio hardware. I'll stick with Jack2 + Netjack2 in the studio until that gets sorted.
vyskocilm 5y ago
An another amazing feature of Pipewire is that it made desktop sharing under Wayland possible. Really awesome piece of a software.
owaislone 5y ago
Any idea when Ubuntu (and other Desktop distros) is planning to switch to this if it hasn't already?
McWobbleston 5y ago
Has anyone had a chance to test how Pipewire works with low latency? I'm excited at the idea of replacing my Pulse+ALSA setup, but I'm also looking for the lowest possible latency I can get as I use my DAW as an instrument :)
- mjevans 5y ago
  It works as well as your hardware and sources support. Pulseaudio added notable latency on my system to begin with, and pipewire defaults to minimal instead; which has corner-cases that are covered by reverting to more "headroom" (device buffer?) similar to the existing behavior of alternatives.
macawfish 5y ago
I really hope the Chromium team (or someone!) decides to support PipeWire for Chromium directly on Linux.
- yobert 5y ago
  The cool thing is, you get all the benefits of pipewire even if the audio comes in over pulse's API. All pulse audio applications magically got faster/lower latency/less buggy for me when I started using pipewire.
gigatexal 5y ago
Folks doing audio work on Linux do you run a low latency kernel Or anything special like that? How does it compare to say a Mac?
kinleyd 5y ago
PipeWire is fantastic already, and I can't wait for it to take Linux audio to where it should and can be! I've got my broken mess of a configuration for alsa, mpd, mpv, Firefox and pulseaudio all working again after a long, broken spell. The only thing I haven't gotten working is the upmixing of channels for 5.1/7.1 audio channel movies on mpv. Currently I rely on my alsa upmixing setup in ~/.asoundrc but am looking forward to having that work with Pipewire alone, hopefully soon. Yes, documentation for pipewire is sparse, and I'm surprised all/most links I see go to pipewire.org, which is where it is sparse. The useful one is here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/home https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/hom...
ncmncm 5y ago
I have one question about PW I have not seen an answer for. At one time I relied on a graphic equalizer module inserted into PA. Then, it went unsupported. Soon after it seemed to have vanished entirely. Is there a supported graphic equalizer I can insert between PW and my poor, damaged ears? If so, what does setting it up involve?
- pmarcelll 5y ago
  There was a tool called PulseEffects that provided a lot of useful audio effects for PA, but when PW got more stable the author dropped support for PA in favor of PW, and the name was also changed to EasyEffects. I started using it recently (also for EQ) and it works fairly well despite still being in very active development.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Thank you.
limaunion 5y ago
I switched about three months ago from pulse to pipewire. Since then I've been experiencing no audio output almost every day I resume my laptop from suspend (s2ram). I did a few tests: reinstalled all the pipewire packgages, removed configuration directories, upgraded to latest available version (Manjaro = 0.3.34). So far nothing did help. The only I can do to fix this is restart the pipewire services. I'll wait for 0.3.35, but if the issue still persists then I'll switch back to pulse...
- majewsky 5y ago
  Have you tried reporting the issue to the PipeWire devs?

531 points by sandebert 5y ago

They have one of the best / most comprehensive FAQs I've ever seen. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ

squarefoot 5y ago

Patiently waiting for Linux to have one audio server that will offer compatibility to all previous ones (that is, all software requiring other audio systems such as oss, alsa, PA, Jack, etc. will be handled gracefully without installing them) while encouraging direct support for new apps, then slowly phasing them out until we have a consistent, possibly layered, low latency audio stack that scales from small single board computers to full sized audio workstations. Choice is a good thing, but too much of it can have negative effects by slowing development and porting down (see window/desktop managers).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kevincox 5y ago
PipeWire is aiming, and positioned to be this service. I don't have a particular case for low-latency audio so I can't comment on that but it is amazing that you can use pavucontrol to tweak your device configuration and volumes then use qjackctl to wire the devices however you want. I'm impressed at how well it works and it even supports better bluetooth codecs than pulseaudio does. It has already shipped by default in Fedora and is available in Arch and NixOS. It does look like it will quickly wipe out PulseAudio by default. I'm sure Jack and ALSA will hang in there longer but they are already used much more rarely (by users, the ALSA API will stick around for decades more I'm sure).
boudin 5y ago
Pipewire is implementing Alsa, Pulse Audio and Jack already. I don't think alsa is going away but I can see Pulse Audio and Jack being replaced by it quite quickly.
- spijdar 5y ago
  I don't think ALSA and Pipewire fill the same niche anyway? I was under the impression ALSA was an API for directly talking to the audio devices, which would be used by Pipewire or Pulseaudio or that in-house solution ChromeOS uses, or whichever flavor of mixer. End-user applications talking directly to ALSA will probably become more uncommon, though. Edit: Yeah, the PipeWire FAQ confirms this https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#does-pipewire-replace-alsa https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
  - jabl 5y ago
    Pipewire indeed doesn't replace ALSA, but it provides the ALSA API, allowing applications coded against the ALSA API to use pipewire.
    - eredengrin 5y ago
      Ah this is very cool to hear, thanks for the clarification.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      I wonder, problems with PA emulating ALSA were AFAIK always blamed on apps abusing ALSA APIs. Does Pipewire do a better job of emulating ALSA than PA did, or does Pipewire just rely on the fixes installed to make those ALSA apps start to work OK on PA?
      - jabl 5y ago
        I'm not familiar with the details of this topic, sorry. I believe PA did (or still does) publish guidelines for a 'safe' subset of the ALSA API. Don't know if Pipewire has published something similar, but I would guess there are corner cases in the ALSA API that wouldn't work well on top of Pipewire. E.g. the buffer rewinding, considering that Pipewire is explicitly designed around never doing that.
- squarefoot 5y ago
Ericson2314 5y ago
To be a bit more on the nose than the other replies? Did you read past the headline at all? This is perhaps one of the best examples of not just making a new standard, but making one implementation to rule them all and implementing all the competing standards. > Patiently waiting for Linux to have one audio server that will offer compatibility to all previous ones That's PipeWire! > then slowly phasing them out until we have a consistent, possibly layered, low latency audio stack that scales from small single board computers to full sized audio workstations. Does PipeWire have its own interface for applications yet? I haven't heard of it if so. That's good; let everything maranate for a while before trying to design the "one, true interface".
ptx 5y ago
Interestingly, FreeBSD and Linux both started with the same audio stack (OSS) and both rewrote it twice[1], but FreeBSD has kept the original OSS API while adding essentially the same features, it seems. The big selling-point of ALSA, from what I remember, was that OSS couldn't provide mixing to support multiple applications - but FreeBSD's OSS does that. Some of the main selling-points of PulseAudio are per-application volume, low latency and high-quality resampling, all of which FreeBSD's OSS claims to do as well. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound
- rofrol 5y ago
  The same features? Interesting. Hiw about bluetooth audio? Support for wayland?
  - nsajko 5y ago
    Wayland is Linux-only.
    - fgrsnau 5y ago
      Not true: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/Wayland I run sway on FreeBSD and haven’t observed problems.

satyanash 5y ago

the transition from pulseaudio -> pipewire was pretty matter-of-fact. A great example of things done right.

lambdaba 5y ago

PipeWire completely removed lag on bluetooth audio for me, which was a nice unexpected surprise.

davidandgoliath 5y ago
I'm in regardless (being I use fedora), but this cements it if that's the case.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I don't have that experience (using AAC, that is), but I do enjoy being able to select the Bluetooth audio codec with Pipewire (SBC, AAC, SBC-XQ, mSBC, etc.). The array of supported and configurable Bluetooth codecs are the reason I switched. Now I can use AAC for music, SBC-XQ for video and interactive content and switch to mSBC when I need to make a call, all from the user interface.

captn3m0 5y ago

Pipewire is great, but it is sadly lacking in end-user documentation. With pulseaudio, if something broke or needed tweaking - I had thousands of forum posts to go through. Even the Arch Wiki has a PulseAudio/Troubleshooting section with various configuration suggestions. For Pipewire, there is no end-user documentation that I've found so far. On one my setups, and all media stops playing, including videos if I forget to plug in my headphone. Restarting pipewire or plugging in devices after that doesn't seem to help, and I have no idea about the pipewire configuration files to even attempt any changes. I would really appreciate some end user debugging and configuration related documents.

eloeffler 5y ago
I haven't used it yet, but could it be that you haven't checked for a while? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Troubleshooting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Troubleshooting There are a couple of sections there
- captn3m0 5y ago
  Nopes, I’ve tried most of this already.
prvc 5y ago
>With pulseaudio, if something broke or needed tweaking >I had thousands of forum posts to go through. That points to what sounds like two disadvantages, if anything.
- captn3m0 5y ago
  That was part of my point - PA’s troubleshooting/tweaking experience was terrible, but it was still feasible.
  - prvc 5y ago
    If you were to experience a novel or rare problem with PulseAudio, you would be in the same boat. The likelihood of a user encountering a problem is more apt than assuming as a given that you're dealing with a problem.

wmanley 5y ago

See also some background in this LWN article: https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/

WD-42 5y ago

The migration to Pipewire has already begun. It is the default option in Arch, at least if you use the new arch-install script.

figomore 5y ago
It’s the default at Fedora too. I’ve been using it at NixOS without any problem.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Does it work well with 21.05 or are you in unstable?

stncls 5y ago

For the last ~12 years, I gave PulseAudio a try every time I upgraded the Fedora distro on my main computers. I almost never had the catastrophic bugs many people complained about. But pulseaudio has always taken 10-15% of one CPU when in use (be it on audio/video calls, or music/movie playback). This is across 3 different laptops and 2 desktops. It is not a huge deal, but it is a bit frustrating on laptops where battery life is precious. I understand that PulseAudio is very powerful, but it represented no practical gain for me personally, with my very simple use cases, so I simply disabled it. Weirdly, I found very few people complaining about PulseAudio's CPU usage. Maybe nobody cares about 10-15% of one core. However, I am happy to report that PipeWire seems to not have this problem at all. Since it became default on Fedora, it has barely shown on top's first page. Given that it is even more ambitious than PulseAudio in terms of latency, this is incredibly impressive!

stncls 5y ago
Note that PipeWire was initiated by Wim Taymans, one of the driving forces behind GStreamer. I think it is one case of the right people in charge of the right projects :-).
timvisee 5y ago
Yes! I experienced the same. Just never publicly complained about it. It's the only constant running thing having high CPU. PipeWire, though still somewhat power hungry, is a lot better.
earthbee 5y ago
Are there any particular circumstance where it takes 10-15% of one CPU for you or is it whenever there is sound playing? I just checked mine while playing music on YouTube and it bounces between 4.0 and 4.8%
- stncls 5y ago
  Whenever there is sound playing or recording. I think it was lower than 10-15% on my most recent desktop, so maybe 4-5% makes sense if your computer is powerful. (While I fully appreciate that it is a very minor annoyance, 5% still frustrates me because PulseAudio added no value to me. I also understand that it added features very useful to other people.)

xrd 5y ago

As others have commented, the documentation is not there yet. I've never had good experiences trying to switch from pulse to pipe. It sounds like some distros are using as the starting point for new installs, like Arch. Is this the best way, to just install a new distro from scratch. I just don't want to try to hack a bunch of configuration files from pulse. If so, what's the best distro offering pipewire. It seems like a revolutionary change and I'm excited to use it.

vbezhenar 5y ago
Fedora uses pipewire. Try LiveCD image.
majewsky 5y ago
> I just don't want to try to hack a bunch of configuration files from pulse. When I migrated from PulseAudio to PipeWire, I started by deleting all PulseAudio packages and installing the PipeWire packages. Then I rebooted and as it turns out, I was done. No fiddling with config files required here. Everything worked immediately.
- xrd 5y ago
  Interesting. What distribution are you using? This is a great idea.

kfajdsl 5y ago

I switched over from pulseaudio to pipewire last week, and I can say it just works (tm), which is the highest praise I can give something like this as a non-power-user.

peakaboo 5y ago
I also did, because pulseaudio was giving me weird sound issues (although they are probably because of Bluetooth to be honest). But I found out about pulsewire and after switching, it just works, so... Plan on keeping using it.

mlang23 5y ago

PulseAudio was and is the disaster that the LAD community has already predicted. Whenever a package manager forced it onto me, I had to figure out how to get rid of it again. Hopefully PieWire will improve things.

jeroenhd 5y ago
In my experience, the Manjaro and Ubuntu package managers make the PipeWire packages "provide" the necessary PulseAudio metapackages to avoid dependency issues. I guess that means even if you don't plan to switch, installing PipeWire right now may help you prevent your package manager from installing Pulse as a dependency.

josteink 5y ago

I’d love to try it out, but for the time being I’m running Ubuntu (for work needs) and there doesn’t seem to be any trivial/non-invasive ways to get PipeWire to run on a regular Ubuntu desktop install. Maybe it makes it to next LTS as an apt-gettable option? I’ll keep my hopes up :)

jabl 5y ago
Last I checked, they are seriously investigating switching to pipewire for the upcoming 21.10 release.
marcodiego 5y ago
Ubuntu has been burned by adopting pulseaudio too early. I've had many problems in 2008 and still have some today. They will probably be more conservative when switching this time.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I don't know about any LTS versions, but 21.04 has pipewire in the standard repo. I expect PW to be in the 22.04 LTS based on that, but I don't expect it to be the default any time soon. This PPA [0] works fine for me in 21.04 to get the latest version. Support for the PPA seems to go back to Bionic, so you should be able to use it on recent LTS versions of Ubuntu as well. The only annoying part of the whole process is that the migration requires running a bunch of commands to stop and mask PulseAudio and to enable pipewire. This guide [1] worked great for me. [0]: https://launchpad.net/~pipewire-debian/+archive/ubuntu/pipewire-upstream https://launchpad.net/~pipewire-debian/+archive/ubuntu/pipew... [1]: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/05/enable-pipewire-audio-service-ubuntu-21-04/ https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/05/enable-pipewire...
- josteink 5y ago
  I'll be damned. That guide actually worked for me. Thanks for the heads up :)

mixmastamyk 5y ago

I tried to hook up a midi keyboard to a raspberry pi, for my kid to practice piano but it didn’t work well. Was Ubuntu Mate with timidity soft synth. Latency was about half a second from key press to sound which made it unplayable. Not sure what else could be done but hopefully this project is a solution.

cjaybo 5y ago
I haven't tried it but you might look into AVLinux, it's supposed to be more real-time performance friendly.
ta988 5y ago
it could be yes, but there are a lot of variables to take into account here. what audio system were you using what were the settings.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Whatever is standard with ubuntu, pulse audio with defaults I believe. At some point I installed jack but it didnt seem to help. I gave up as several hours were all I had to spare. :-/
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I use an RPi4 for a high end self-built e-piano (StudioLogic weighted key controller, Pianoteq for synthesis, ART monitors, HifiBerry pro-audio DAC). Latency is fine, but you won't get the same results with stock Ubuntu Mate. The "solutions" don't involve Pipewire per se, although in the future that might be the technology in use.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  I don’t understand what is “stock” in this scenario.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

ta988 5y ago

I've replaced jack by pipewire for all my audio work. It works pretty well, still a few xruns occasionally but it has been really transparent with pw-jack and reduced a lot the various crashes I would see with jackthat would kick all the clients from time to time.

commoner 5y ago

PipeWire is how audio should be on Linux, and it's ready to use. No more complications between PulseAudio, ALSA, and JACK. PipeWire implements all 3 of these interfaces, which means you can use applications that depend on any or all of these interfaces simultaneously with no conflicts. Playing a video in Firefox and a track in a digital audio workstation at the same time works with no special configuration. PipeWire makes audio on Linux as easy as it is on other OSes. The Arch Wiki page describes some of the use cases for PipeWire: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

marcodiego 5y ago
It is a shame it took so long but it is finally here. The feeling may be similar to when pulseaudio arrived, but it is not the same thing; Pipewire implements everything that is needed; users will no longer need to care about handoff between alsa, pulseaudio and jack. It manages video streams too and the latest version of OBS even makes use of it to allow screen sharing on wayland running from flatpak. Finally! I've been watching linux since the OSS days. I used oss, alsa, arts, esd, jack, pulseaudio... never it has been looking as well aimed as it is this time. Finally!
- buu700 5y ago
  I haven't read the article yet, but how big a deal is this? Is this something that distros are likely to adopt on top of or in place of PulseAudio? Does this make any existing part of the Linux audio stack/ecosystem redundant, or is it strictly solving a problem (or problems) that had yet to be addressed?
  - necubi 5y ago
    Yes, it replaces PulseAudio and Jack. Its goal is to provide a single audio daemon that can serve both consumer applications (where power consumption is typically most important) and pro applications (where latency is most important). Currently those are served by PulseAudio and Jack, so it's very exciting to have a single service that can cover both use cases. It also replaces part of ALSA, which is two things: the kernel interface to talk to audio devices, and a set of user libraries on top of that interface. PipeWire still uses the former, but has its own, better API for the latter (in addition to supporting ALSA, PulseAudio, and Jack APIs).

bananaoomarang 5y ago

Switched to pipewire last year at some point and it has been remarkably pain free. Bluetooth support seems more robust (no more weird 'have to reboot my computer to connect to these headphones for some reason') but the real headline feature is I no longer have to screw around to get pulseaudio and jack to coexist peacefully (nigh on impossible in my experience)

marcodiego 5y ago

Wanted to try debian 11 last weekend. First time I installed it from debootstrap. I plugged in a 1TB SSD on an USB 2.0 to SATA case, formatted it, prepared the root filesystem with debootstrap, chrooted to it, installed a bunch of packages, setup locale and timezone, installed linux-image, grub and booted it. Worked flawlessly. Tried a "ps|aux" and discovered it is already running wayland and pipewire. Works so well it is boring. Nice!

horsawlarway 5y ago
This has been my experience with Wayland/Pipewire - Things just work. I've been blown away by how good things like touchpad/gesture/multi-monitor support are in Wayland as well. I tried really, really hard to run linux on a laptop in 2010, and eventually just settled on virtualizing it for acceptable device compatibility. In 2020, my linux laptop genuinely feels much better than the macbook my office issued me. Like - actually better. Not "Better because I control it and it's free/opensource", just "Better".
- vegai_ 5y ago
  >In 2020, my linux laptop genuinely feels much better than the macbook my office issued me. Like - actually better. Not "Better because I control it and it's free/opensource", just "Better". Yes! This is the point of Linux and other open source. We don't use open source because it's "morally better", we use it because it consistently produces superior solutions.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > We don't use open source because it's "morally better", we use it because it consistently produces superior solutions. Why not both?

bryanmikaelian 5y ago

PipeWire was the only way I could get AirPod Pros to work in headset mode. With pulseaudio, it was rabbit hole after rabbit hole only to find a solution that ended up not working. I switched a few weeks ago and haven’t looked back.

OJFord 5y ago

I've found the AV sync considerably off watching Youtube videos in Firefox with Bluetooth earphones (not tried other combinations) since switching to Pipewire. It's not something I do enough that I was bothered to switch back to Pulseaudio, and haven't really dug into it yet. But while it's mentioned here.. anyone else have that, or know what it might be?

EvanDotPro 5y ago
I use Bluetooth ear buds (OnePlus Buds) daily on Fedora with Pipewire and haven't noticed any perceivable sync issues myself. Edit: Other comments are mentioning codec selection for Bluetooth in relation to lag/sync issues. I'm using whatever is default on Fedora 34. I've never looked and am not at my computer to check right now unfortunately.

lom 5y ago

When I first tried it a year ago, it worked for some time until some update that broke my headphones. Half a year ago, when I installed another distro I gave it another shot and it worked OOTB. But unfortunately a month ago my headphones stopped working. But they still/always worked in pulseaudio. There seem to be a few issues with my symptoms, yet the maintainers haven’t fixed the regression yet… Until then I’ll be having to use pulse

EvanDotPro 5y ago

Long time daily Fedora user here. PipeWire is what we've needed for so long in terms of audio, not to mention more recently in terms of screen capture with Wayland. The only issue I've run into is that for some apps (Zoom, Firefox, Chrome) which are set to use my "default audio device" for input or output, it selects the correct device initially, but if I change the default/system device (via gnome sound settings) later while it's in use, most (all?) of the time, the application continues using whatever device was selected initially. I haven't bothered to debug or see if this is a known issue as it hasn't bothered me much since most apps allow switching to explicit input/output devices which works fine. I believe (but haven't definitively confirmed) that changes via pavucontrol also work, so perhaps it's something with the gnome sound settings? Anyway, huge thanks to the devs who put their time, effort, experience, and talent into making PipeWire happen. It's a huge step forward on multiple fronts

preek 5y ago
I have the same issue with PulseAudio and Zoom and it’s always been like this this.

jagger27 5y ago

I find it beautiful that the LDAC codec used with Sony wireless Bluetooth headphones only works on Linux through PipeWire. macOS is stuck with AAC, and Windows gets aptX. Linux gets all of them. Who do I thank for making this Just Work?

SSLy 5y ago
Probably EHfive for their pioneering work on integrating those into PA/bluez https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt
smoldesu 5y ago
Let it be officiated here if not already: The $350 WH-1000XM4 has invariably higher-bandwith, higher-resolution audio than the $500+ Airpods Max. Whoever set that price at Apple is squirming in their seat, I can't seem to find it being sold new for more than $550.
- jagger27 5y ago
  This is part of the reason why I returned my AirPods Max two days after trying them out and stuck with my Sony WH-100XM4s. Even though the AirPods were better for quick switching between devices, have a better voice chat experience, and have better noise cancellation, they don't universally sound better. I wasn't impressed at all by the sound quality. They also clamp extremely hard on my big head compared to the Sonys. The lack of comfort on such expensive cans is a big deal breaker. I'm keeping a close eye on what Sony does next, because most of what they're doing now is really good.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Does this Sony thing phone home, or demand other concessions? I bought Audio Technica phones sometime back. The pads have burst twice. Now all the active features are dead. I had sworn off Sony products because they always quit working after a year. Do they still do this? I felt like I was just renting.
  - 5y ago

pshirshov 5y ago

Out of curiosity: I believe that pipewire was supposed to solve the remote desktop problem for wayland. I mean real RDP, not VNC. What's the situation with RDP on wayland?

mindwok 5y ago
Depends on what desktop environment (Compositor, specifically) you're using. Gnome (Mutter) has RDP support built in but the documentation is pretty scarce and it only has a CLI interface. I'm not aware of any other distros with RDP support over Wayland, they mostly only use VNC.

mr_sturd 5y ago

I moved from PulseAudio to SnapCast for streaming audio over my local network as it was easier to configure multiple sinks for multi-room audio. It looks as though there is support for similar with PipeWire, with the ROC sink and ROC source modules[0][1]. I'm going to have to set aside some time to have a poke around with this and see how it performs. [0] - https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_sink.html https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_sink.html [1] - https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_source.html https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_roc_source.html

e3bc54b2 5y ago
Do you have documentation or any blog post on your setup? Lsat I tried snapcast, it worked, but eventually had too much lag between nodes. And there is no UI bundled by default, so I was wondering what the most mature frontend would be.
- radus 5y ago
  Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but I use Snapcast to stream from a record player to anywhere on the network [1]. Snapweb [2] works really well but has some issues on iOS currently. Some alternative clients are listed on the main repo [3]. 1: https://radusuciu.com/posts/wireless-vinyl/ https://radusuciu.com/posts/wireless-vinyl/ 2: https://github.com/badaix/snapweb https://github.com/badaix/snapweb 3: https://github.com/badaix/snapcast#contributions https://github.com/badaix/snapcast#contributions
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Snap let's you set latency for nodes, so you can tweak timings.
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
I’d appreciate any notes on your experiences doing this, even in a trashy pastebin dump. I briefly looked at this but didn’t have time to implement it correctly, and suspect there’ll be a few gotchtas given the relatively baby age of the project

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Podman + Pipewire (and soon Wireplumber), two things to love about Fedora.

Venn1 5y ago

PipeWire is a fantastic bit of software and it's great on the desktop. I would play around with it in the studio but it lacks a netjack2 equivalent. zita-n2j is not a replacement since it requires the client to have audio hardware. I'll stick with Jack2 + Netjack2 in the studio until that gets sorted.

vyskocilm 5y ago

An another amazing feature of Pipewire is that it made desktop sharing under Wayland possible. Really awesome piece of a software.

owaislone 5y ago

Any idea when Ubuntu (and other Desktop distros) is planning to switch to this if it hasn't already?

McWobbleston 5y ago

Has anyone had a chance to test how Pipewire works with low latency? I'm excited at the idea of replacing my Pulse+ALSA setup, but I'm also looking for the lowest possible latency I can get as I use my DAW as an instrument :)

mjevans 5y ago
It works as well as your hardware and sources support. Pulseaudio added notable latency on my system to begin with, and pipewire defaults to minimal instead; which has corner-cases that are covered by reverting to more "headroom" (device buffer?) similar to the existing behavior of alternatives.

macawfish 5y ago

I really hope the Chromium team (or someone!) decides to support PipeWire for Chromium directly on Linux.

yobert 5y ago
The cool thing is, you get all the benefits of pipewire even if the audio comes in over pulse's API. All pulse audio applications magically got faster/lower latency/less buggy for me when I started using pipewire.

gigatexal 5y ago

Folks doing audio work on Linux do you run a low latency kernel Or anything special like that? How does it compare to say a Mac?

kinleyd 5y ago

PipeWire is fantastic already, and I can't wait for it to take Linux audio to where it should and can be! I've got my broken mess of a configuration for alsa, mpd, mpv, Firefox and pulseaudio all working again after a long, broken spell. The only thing I haven't gotten working is the upmixing of channels for 5.1/7.1 audio channel movies on mpv. Currently I rely on my alsa upmixing setup in ~/.asoundrc but am looking forward to having that work with Pipewire alone, hopefully soon. Yes, documentation for pipewire is sparse, and I'm surprised all/most links I see go to pipewire.org, which is where it is sparse. The useful one is here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/home https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/hom...

ncmncm 5y ago

I have one question about PW I have not seen an answer for. At one time I relied on a graphic equalizer module inserted into PA. Then, it went unsupported. Soon after it seemed to have vanished entirely. Is there a supported graphic equalizer I can insert between PW and my poor, damaged ears? If so, what does setting it up involve?

pmarcelll 5y ago
There was a tool called PulseEffects that provided a lot of useful audio effects for PA, but when PW got more stable the author dropped support for PA in favor of PW, and the name was also changed to EasyEffects. I started using it recently (also for EQ) and it works fairly well despite still being in very active development.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Thank you.

limaunion 5y ago

I switched about three months ago from pulse to pipewire. Since then I've been experiencing no audio output almost every day I resume my laptop from suspend (s2ram). I did a few tests: reinstalled all the pipewire packgages, removed configuration directories, upgraded to latest available version (Manjaro = 0.3.34). So far nothing did help. The only I can do to fix this is restart the pipewire services. I'll wait for 0.3.35, but if the issue still persists then I'll switch back to pulse...

majewsky 5y ago
Have you tried reporting the issue to the PipeWire devs?