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Is anybody here using pipewire to stream to a different machine on the same network? I currently use Pulseaudio to send audio from my laptop to a raspberry (wi

Is anybody here using pipewire to stream to a different machine on the same network? I currently use Pulseaudio to send audio from my laptop to a raspberry (with a DAC hat) connected to my hifi, but it turns out it's a pretty niche use case. So I'm looking for anybody with a similar use case who has upgraded from PA to PW and can talk about the experience.

jck 5y ago
I've had good luck with this method: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devices_with_computers_on_the_network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devi...
- kirenida 5y ago
  Yeah, that looks like the PA conf I'm currently using. Did you notice any difference after switching to Pipewire?
mr_person 5y ago
I have been attempting this in some way or another for a month or two. So far, no luck. The most realistic option I have found would be to use NetJack, but while its been noted in a roadmap as a relatively straightforward protocol, it is not yet implemented (at least, it wasn't last time i looked). It may be possible to hack a pipewire-jack client to do it now... but that seems like more effort than its worth. An alternative would be Scream, if all you want is one-way streaming. If anyone has any other ideas, i would be very much interested too!
- em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
  You could also use jacktrip. Jacktrip is a jack client, so it will work under pipewire.
gbtw 5y ago
I have a similar setup, however it seems that video doesn't want to play in browsers with the networked audio for some reason. Anyone else experience that?
desarun 5y ago
Tangentially related to your use case but check out https://moodeaudio.org/ https://moodeaudio.org/ Got it running on a Pi+DAC & use spotify connect mostly, but occasionally throw stuff from my NAS on to it.
stuaxo 5y ago
I can't talk about that, but I will make a recommendation to try streaming with ROC. I've done quite a bit of streaming in the past with pulseaudio-dlna and the extreme lag isn't fantastic. https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/ https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/ I'm also curious about using PW, I upgraded, but I haven't setup any streaming yet.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  I've been using roc with pipewire and pulseaudio for a while now and it works really well (much better than pulseaudios native tcp connection for example). You set target latency on the receiver and 150ms is enough to have (almost) no breaks in audio over a couple of hours
  - kirenida 5y ago
    I found ROC at one point, but the native PA tcp connection actually works good enough for me. The only problem I had with my setup was when I changed my router to a Mikrotik hap ac2 - there was a lot of stuttering and dropouts. After switching to OpenWRT on the Mikrotik, everything became usable again :)
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
I bookmarked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 a while ago. I’d love a Sonos-esc ecosystem that doesn’t arbitrarily expire also.
Arnavion 5y ago
I forward the pulseaudio socket (pipewire-pulse, to be precise) over ssh and it works fine.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Could you share the command to do that? I've seen `foo | ssh bar`; is it just `source | ssh 'cat >/path/to/pipe'`?
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    ssh -R /run/user/1000/pulse/native:/run/user/1000/pulse/native remote_host ... assuming the SSH client is the one with the audio device and remote_host is the one that wants to play audio. If it's the other way around then replace -R with -L.
bentcorner 5y ago
Just in case anyone wants to do something similar between Windows boxes, NDI and Voicemeeter both do this pretty well. Voicemeeter has more features but audio quality can be hard to get right and setup can be convoluted. NDI is very very easy to configure but doesn't have as many options. I do this "into" a RDP session in a VM on the same machine (because RDP audio is really really bad) and both of the above tools worked really well for me.

jck 5y ago

I've had good luck with this method: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devices_with_computers_on_the_network https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devi...

kirenida 5y ago
Yeah, that looks like the PA conf I'm currently using. Did you notice any difference after switching to Pipewire?

mr_person 5y ago

I have been attempting this in some way or another for a month or two. So far, no luck. The most realistic option I have found would be to use NetJack, but while its been noted in a roadmap as a relatively straightforward protocol, it is not yet implemented (at least, it wasn't last time i looked). It may be possible to hack a pipewire-jack client to do it now... but that seems like more effort than its worth. An alternative would be Scream, if all you want is one-way streaming. If anyone has any other ideas, i would be very much interested too!

em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
You could also use jacktrip. Jacktrip is a jack client, so it will work under pipewire.

gbtw 5y ago

I have a similar setup, however it seems that video doesn't want to play in browsers with the networked audio for some reason. Anyone else experience that?

desarun 5y ago

Tangentially related to your use case but check out https://moodeaudio.org/ https://moodeaudio.org/ Got it running on a Pi+DAC & use spotify connect mostly, but occasionally throw stuff from my NAS on to it.

stuaxo 5y ago

I can't talk about that, but I will make a recommendation to try streaming with ROC. I've done quite a bit of streaming in the past with pulseaudio-dlna and the extreme lag isn't fantastic. https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/ https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/ I'm also curious about using PW, I upgraded, but I haven't setup any streaming yet.

bmicraft 5y ago
I've been using roc with pipewire and pulseaudio for a while now and it works really well (much better than pulseaudios native tcp connection for example). You set target latency on the receiver and 150ms is enough to have (almost) no breaks in audio over a couple of hours
- kirenida 5y ago
  I found ROC at one point, but the native PA tcp connection actually works good enough for me. The only problem I had with my setup was when I changed my router to a Mikrotik hap ac2 - there was a lot of stuttering and dropouts. After switching to OpenWRT on the Mikrotik, everything became usable again :)

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago

I bookmarked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514876 a while ago. I’d love a Sonos-esc ecosystem that doesn’t arbitrarily expire also.

Arnavion 5y ago

I forward the pulseaudio socket (pipewire-pulse, to be precise) over ssh and it works fine.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Could you share the command to do that? I've seen `foo | ssh bar`; is it just `source | ssh 'cat >/path/to/pipe'`?
- Arnavion 5y ago
  ssh -R /run/user/1000/pulse/native:/run/user/1000/pulse/native remote_host ... assuming the SSH client is the one with the audio device and remote_host is the one that wants to play audio. If it's the other way around then replace -R with -L.

bentcorner 5y ago

Just in case anyone wants to do something similar between Windows boxes, NDI and Voicemeeter both do this pretty well. Voicemeeter has more features but audio quality can be hard to get right and setup can be convoluted. NDI is very very easy to configure but doesn't have as many options. I do this "into" a RDP session in a VM on the same machine (because RDP audio is really really bad) and both of the above tools worked really well for me.