8 ms·

Pipewire to replace Pulseaudion on Ubuntu 22.10

142 points by marcodiego 4y ago

pawelduda 4y ago
Pipewire finally fixed previously unfixable audio delay buildup over bluetooth when the system was under load. I've been using it for over 2 years and did not experience any drawbacks.
- eliaspro 4y ago
  I seem to be an exception. Although I love Pipewire for doing a lot of things right and finally solving a lot of issues that plagued Linux' multimedia stack in the past, I haven't had any major issues with PA for at least 10 years, while now that I switched to Pipewire a while ago I have occasional stuttering Bluetooth audio once again.
alaricus 4y ago
This is really great news. Pipewire made great progress in the last few years. It solves a lot of problems I had with Bluetooth headsets in PulseAudio.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I'm using Pop!_OS 22.04, and I still have serious issues with bluetooth quality. At least for my setup: laptop <--> AirPods. AFAIK this version of Pop!_OS is using pipewire, so I wonder if there's still more work to be done?
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    There has been a war raging over at r/pop_os over the quality of the 22.04 release.
- Kudos 4y ago
  Anecdotally, Bluetooth audio is now better for me than on my Windows (same hardware) and Mac devices. From poor quality to higher latency, Pipewire's made quality at least as good, and latency the best of the three OSes.
  - johnday 4y ago
    Seconding this. On my c.2020 high-end laptop running Win11, from switching on my BT headphones to hearing audio through them takes around 8 seconds and sometimes requires manual intervention. On my c.2013 laptop running Arch+PW, 3 seconds.
  - alaricus 4y ago
    This is also my experience. Pipewire is better than Android or Mac.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
I think the title has a typo.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  It has been rushed just like the reported decision
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    It sounds like I've missed some backstory. I gather people have issues with Pop!_OS 22.04's audio subsystem? From my perspective, 22.04 is no better or worse than previous releases. I've always had Bluetooth audio issues with Linux. And I'm usually outputting audio to the laptop speakers or to HDMI, which have worked just fine.
    - diffeomorphism 4y ago
      My comparison is with fedora (pipewire by default) and debian stable (pulseaudio). Bluetooth works better, e.g. switching between headset and better audio quality automatically, and you get compatibility with Jack for free. Also sound and video recording and sharing now has a nicer standard and works better with wayland. That said, it is a drop-in replacement, so pretty unnoticeable for most purposes. So if you notice nothing at all, that means success.
  - dvh 4y ago
    I remember when Ubuntu's boss announced moving window buttons to the left two weeks after ui freeze of upcoming lts. That was the beginning of the end of the Ubuntu's desktop for me.
    - oblak 4y ago
      Luckily, it was possible for revert this change. I kind of liked Unity. Still not sure why most people hated it
    - knorker 4y ago
squarefoot 4y ago
I hope some day I'll be able to make Pipewire work on Debian without messing everything else in the process: tried to install and set up it a few times and always failed ending up with no audio. Now I have an almost perfect situation with very low latency (4 ms or less) using Reaper with Alsa alone, no Jack involved. Also, by using Yabridge I solved all compatibility problems with Windows plugins, even those which wouldn't run anymore on modern Windows versions. If you ever had problems with LinVST, Yabridge will likely eliminate them all. My only problem now is the inability to play along a track I'm listening to with Qmmp or other player (that is, outside of Reaper) as it takes entire control of the audio. I would have to use either Pulseaudio with much much higher latency or Jack with all its configuration issues.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I don't know about your specific use case but my switch to Pipewire (on Ubuntu, to be fair) was quite easy to pull off. Stop+disable/uninstall PulseAudio, install Pipewire + Wireplumber + pipewire-pulse + whatever else you need, enable the necessary services by default on login and you're mostly done. My switch to Manjaro has only left me with one annoyance and that's that it doesn't remember the default sink for some reason. So far the 2 second clicks haven't been annoying enough for me to invest time into fixing that, but one day I'll probably find that darn broken setting...
  - andrewshadura 4y ago
    The Ubuntu PipeWire integration comes, in fact, from Debian.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Of course, but Ubuntu and Debian ship different versions of system libraries so one experience doesn't transfer to the other as well as you might otherwise expect.
  - squarefoot 4y ago
    I also plan to switch the music PC to Manjaro soon. I really like that distro, maybe not as Debian for tinkering (networking, embedded boards, etc) but for desktop use looks really great to me: I already install it whenever someone asks me to migrate to Linux their PC.
branon 4y ago
Nice, I think this is great. Say what you will about Canonical but they've got the market share and the cajones to switch up defaults like this (Wayland, PipeWire) which will ultimately help drive forward innovation and adoption.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Red Hat/Fedora were the ones to develop and push both Wayland and Pipewire, and Fedora was the first distro to make both default. Ubuntu is merely following their lead.
  - dralley 4y ago
    Arch switched months ago, as well.
    - Mikeb85 4y ago
      Ah nice. Not gonna lie, Arch isn't really on my radar. I just know Wayland/Pipewire (among other things) were developed by Red Hat employees.
      - aaomidi 4y ago
        I've been recommending endeavourOS to people recently. Arch makes a lot of people go "wow" when they see how nice the AUR is.
        eternityforest 4y ago
        I tried Manjaro in a VM and was pretty disappointed by AUR. The selection is only a little ahead of Debian's official core packages. Debian 11 and derivatives really have a lot. I also don't like how you have to compile your own AUR frontend. You would think that would be pre-included, since it seems to be one of the star attractions of Arch. I wasn't a fan of how long it takes to compile things. I also remember having to figure out dependencies manually, it doesn't just do it all for you like apt/dpkg. I don't fully trust it any more than random AppImages from GitHub releases, to be honest, since I've heard there has been malware in the past, and compiling yourself gives zero protection. Unless you are going to read through tens of thousands to millions of lines of code, you're still just trusting whoever put the package up there, and hoping you would have heard about it if there was a virus. I suspect not nearly as many people go around randomly reviewing code as some might like to think. It does work, and I can see the value if you want to use things that for whatever reason aren't in Debian. I actually kind of like the curation effect that Debian has though. If it's in the repos, it gives you a clue about what is popular enough that someone bothered maintaining it. If it's not in Debian and Fedora, it's probably more experimental than I'd like it to be.
staticassertion 4y ago
Is there a good document comparing the two?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  I'm looking for this too(random forum posts and reddit comments don't count), wasn't even aware there was an alternative for pulseaudio...
- e12e 4y ago
  Not a comparison, but an overview, and an update: https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2022/03/08/pipewire-a-year-in-review-look-ahead/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2022/03/08/pipe...
- dralley 4y ago
  The FAQ is pretty good, though not a deep technical document https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ
  - dougmsmith 4y ago
    - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      >Poettering is a fraud who literally hates polar bears I'll put that in my fortune file.
brink 4y ago
That's fantastic! I swapped out pulseaudio for pipewire on my Arch installation and it immediately fixed all of my bluetooth issues. Everything just worked.
nickserv 4y ago
Great news! Had some problems with my Jabra USB sound card for wireless headphones until I switched over to pipewire. Also helped latency issues in OBS studio with my USB mic.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kabes 4y ago
Hard to overstate what a blessing Wim Taymans has been for dealing with AV in linux. Both gstreamer and pipewire have really moved the bar. Qualitative engineered and a joy to work with.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  He would be high on my list if I were on the committee for some kind of software Nobel Prize.
tmalsburg2 4y ago
Doesn’t support audio output to dlna devices on the network. Seems I will be stuck with pulsesaudio for now.
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
emilyst 4y ago
Did Ubuntu choose WirePlumber or `pipewire-media-session`? Arch tried to switch off from `pipewire-media-session`, because it's merely a proof of concept whose development is dead, but found that WirePlumber simply isn't ready yet (https://archlinux.org/news/undone-replacement-of-pipewire-media-session-with-wireplumber/ https://archlinux.org/news/undone-replacement-of-pipewire-me...). It seems like, unless and until WirePlumber is actually ready, PipeWire isn't quite ready?
- faho 4y ago
  That news item is only saying that wireplumber will activate pipewire as an audio server, and won't allow you to use it for video only (with pulseaudio serving audio). It's irrelevant for those who've picked pipewire as audio server specifically, so it will most likely be irrelevant for Ubuntu. Plus the Ubuntu 22.10 release is in October 22 (they use calendar versioning), so there's still some time to work out the kinks.
goodguyamerikan 4y ago
Take a moment to thank leonard Potter, who despite death threats from ignorant "fanboys" and incessant mockery from people who never wrote a line of non-bash code has made immense contributions to Linux being usable on desktop. If someday Linux does end up being usable by the average Joe, Mr potter would have had a huge role to play in it. Let's trmenytgat pipewire stands on the shoulder of giants and it replaces an excellent system (which sadlt rarely happens in Linux space)
- hulitu 4y ago
  Did you ever used Pulseaudio. Some years ago sound was not working at all, the only way to make it work was to kill pulseaudiod and stick with ALSA. Now it started working and is being replaced. No comment.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    Pulse was a long time ago. I think it was a bad idea to not cover low latency, but it's not Lennart's fault if distros shipped it too soon. It works fine now, and was a lot nicer than raw ALSA at the time. But Pipewire is definitely an upgrade.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I find the lack of user consent in this disturbing (unless there's a choice?)
rapjr9 4y ago
Does it handle ASIO for multitrack audio recording and playback? Would it let me plug multiple Black Magic Design video I/O cards into a linux machine and use them simultaneously? Does it do AES50, MADI, AVB, Soundgrid, and Dante?

142 points by marcodiego 4y ago

Pipewire finally fixed previously unfixable audio delay buildup over bluetooth when the system was under load. I've been using it for over 2 years and did not experience any drawbacks.

eliaspro 4y ago
I seem to be an exception. Although I love Pipewire for doing a lot of things right and finally solving a lot of issues that plagued Linux' multimedia stack in the past, I haven't had any major issues with PA for at least 10 years, while now that I switched to Pipewire a while ago I have occasional stuttering Bluetooth audio once again.

alaricus 4y ago

This is really great news. Pipewire made great progress in the last few years. It solves a lot of problems I had with Bluetooth headsets in PulseAudio.

CoastalCoder 4y ago
I'm using Pop!_OS 22.04, and I still have serious issues with bluetooth quality. At least for my setup: laptop <--> AirPods. AFAIK this version of Pop!_OS is using pipewire, so I wonder if there's still more work to be done?
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  There has been a war raging over at r/pop_os over the quality of the 22.04 release.
Kudos 4y ago
Anecdotally, Bluetooth audio is now better for me than on my Windows (same hardware) and Mac devices. From poor quality to higher latency, Pipewire's made quality at least as good, and latency the best of the three OSes.
- johnday 4y ago
  Seconding this. On my c.2020 high-end laptop running Win11, from switching on my BT headphones to hearing audio through them takes around 8 seconds and sometimes requires manual intervention. On my c.2013 laptop running Arch+PW, 3 seconds.
- alaricus 4y ago
  This is also my experience. Pipewire is better than Android or Mac.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

I think the title has a typo.

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
It has been rushed just like the reported decision
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  It sounds like I've missed some backstory. I gather people have issues with Pop!_OS 22.04's audio subsystem? From my perspective, 22.04 is no better or worse than previous releases. I've always had Bluetooth audio issues with Linux. And I'm usually outputting audio to the laptop speakers or to HDMI, which have worked just fine.
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    My comparison is with fedora (pipewire by default) and debian stable (pulseaudio). Bluetooth works better, e.g. switching between headset and better audio quality automatically, and you get compatibility with Jack for free. Also sound and video recording and sharing now has a nicer standard and works better with wayland. That said, it is a drop-in replacement, so pretty unnoticeable for most purposes. So if you notice nothing at all, that means success.
- dvh 4y ago
  I remember when Ubuntu's boss announced moving window buttons to the left two weeks after ui freeze of upcoming lts. That was the beginning of the end of the Ubuntu's desktop for me.
  - oblak 4y ago
    Luckily, it was possible for revert this change. I kind of liked Unity. Still not sure why most people hated it
  - knorker 4y ago

squarefoot 4y ago

I hope some day I'll be able to make Pipewire work on Debian without messing everything else in the process: tried to install and set up it a few times and always failed ending up with no audio. Now I have an almost perfect situation with very low latency (4 ms or less) using Reaper with Alsa alone, no Jack involved. Also, by using Yabridge I solved all compatibility problems with Windows plugins, even those which wouldn't run anymore on modern Windows versions. If you ever had problems with LinVST, Yabridge will likely eliminate them all. My only problem now is the inability to play along a track I'm listening to with Qmmp or other player (that is, outside of Reaper) as it takes entire control of the audio. I would have to use either Pulseaudio with much much higher latency or Jack with all its configuration issues.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I don't know about your specific use case but my switch to Pipewire (on Ubuntu, to be fair) was quite easy to pull off. Stop+disable/uninstall PulseAudio, install Pipewire + Wireplumber + pipewire-pulse + whatever else you need, enable the necessary services by default on login and you're mostly done. My switch to Manjaro has only left me with one annoyance and that's that it doesn't remember the default sink for some reason. So far the 2 second clicks haven't been annoying enough for me to invest time into fixing that, but one day I'll probably find that darn broken setting...
- andrewshadura 4y ago
  The Ubuntu PipeWire integration comes, in fact, from Debian.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Of course, but Ubuntu and Debian ship different versions of system libraries so one experience doesn't transfer to the other as well as you might otherwise expect.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  I also plan to switch the music PC to Manjaro soon. I really like that distro, maybe not as Debian for tinkering (networking, embedded boards, etc) but for desktop use looks really great to me: I already install it whenever someone asks me to migrate to Linux their PC.

branon 4y ago

Nice, I think this is great. Say what you will about Canonical but they've got the market share and the cajones to switch up defaults like this (Wayland, PipeWire) which will ultimately help drive forward innovation and adoption.

Mikeb85 4y ago
Red Hat/Fedora were the ones to develop and push both Wayland and Pipewire, and Fedora was the first distro to make both default. Ubuntu is merely following their lead.
- dralley 4y ago
  Arch switched months ago, as well.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    Ah nice. Not gonna lie, Arch isn't really on my radar. I just know Wayland/Pipewire (among other things) were developed by Red Hat employees.
    - aaomidi 4y ago
      I've been recommending endeavourOS to people recently. Arch makes a lot of people go "wow" when they see how nice the AUR is.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        I tried Manjaro in a VM and was pretty disappointed by AUR. The selection is only a little ahead of Debian's official core packages. Debian 11 and derivatives really have a lot. I also don't like how you have to compile your own AUR frontend. You would think that would be pre-included, since it seems to be one of the star attractions of Arch. I wasn't a fan of how long it takes to compile things. I also remember having to figure out dependencies manually, it doesn't just do it all for you like apt/dpkg. I don't fully trust it any more than random AppImages from GitHub releases, to be honest, since I've heard there has been malware in the past, and compiling yourself gives zero protection. Unless you are going to read through tens of thousands to millions of lines of code, you're still just trusting whoever put the package up there, and hoping you would have heard about it if there was a virus. I suspect not nearly as many people go around randomly reviewing code as some might like to think. It does work, and I can see the value if you want to use things that for whatever reason aren't in Debian. I actually kind of like the curation effect that Debian has though. If it's in the repos, it gives you a clue about what is popular enough that someone bothered maintaining it. If it's not in Debian and Fedora, it's probably more experimental than I'd like it to be.

staticassertion 4y ago

Is there a good document comparing the two?

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
I'm looking for this too(random forum posts and reddit comments don't count), wasn't even aware there was an alternative for pulseaudio...
e12e 4y ago
Not a comparison, but an overview, and an update: https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://lwn.net/Articles/847412/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2022/03/08/pipewire-a-year-in-review-look-ahead/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2022/03/08/pipe...
dralley 4y ago
The FAQ is pretty good, though not a deep technical document https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ
- dougmsmith 4y ago
  - sam_lowry_ 4y ago
    >Poettering is a fraud who literally hates polar bears I'll put that in my fortune file.

brink 4y ago

That's fantastic! I swapped out pulseaudio for pipewire on my Arch installation and it immediately fixed all of my bluetooth issues. Everything just worked.

nickserv 4y ago

Great news! Had some problems with my Jabra USB sound card for wireless headphones until I switched over to pipewire. Also helped latency issues in OBS studio with my USB mic.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kabes 4y ago

Hard to overstate what a blessing Wim Taymans has been for dealing with AV in linux. Both gstreamer and pipewire have really moved the bar. Qualitative engineered and a joy to work with.

eternityforest 4y ago
He would be high on my list if I were on the committee for some kind of software Nobel Prize.

tmalsburg2 4y ago

Doesn’t support audio output to dlna devices on the network. Seems I will be stuck with pulsesaudio for now.

throwawaymanbot 4y ago

emilyst 4y ago

Did Ubuntu choose WirePlumber or `pipewire-media-session`? Arch tried to switch off from `pipewire-media-session`, because it's merely a proof of concept whose development is dead, but found that WirePlumber simply isn't ready yet (https://archlinux.org/news/undone-replacement-of-pipewire-media-session-with-wireplumber/ https://archlinux.org/news/undone-replacement-of-pipewire-me...). It seems like, unless and until WirePlumber is actually ready, PipeWire isn't quite ready?

faho 4y ago
That news item is only saying that wireplumber will activate pipewire as an audio server, and won't allow you to use it for video only (with pulseaudio serving audio). It's irrelevant for those who've picked pipewire as audio server specifically, so it will most likely be irrelevant for Ubuntu. Plus the Ubuntu 22.10 release is in October 22 (they use calendar versioning), so there's still some time to work out the kinks.

goodguyamerikan 4y ago

Take a moment to thank leonard Potter, who despite death threats from ignorant "fanboys" and incessant mockery from people who never wrote a line of non-bash code has made immense contributions to Linux being usable on desktop. If someday Linux does end up being usable by the average Joe, Mr potter would have had a huge role to play in it. Let's trmenytgat pipewire stands on the shoulder of giants and it replaces an excellent system (which sadlt rarely happens in Linux space)

hulitu 4y ago
Did you ever used Pulseaudio. Some years ago sound was not working at all, the only way to make it work was to kill pulseaudiod and stick with ALSA. Now it started working and is being replaced. No comment.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  Pulse was a long time ago. I think it was a bad idea to not cover low latency, but it's not Lennart's fault if distros shipped it too soon. It works fine now, and was a lot nicer than raw ALSA at the time. But Pipewire is definitely an upgrade.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

I find the lack of user consent in this disturbing (unless there's a choice?)

rapjr9 4y ago

Does it handle ASIO for multitrack audio recording and playback? Would it let me plug multiple Black Magic Design video I/O cards into a linux machine and use them simultaneously? Does it do AES50, MADI, AVB, Soundgrid, and Dante?