5 ms·

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playba

I use PipeWire on my desktop and laptop, and its doing a better job than pulse ever did. That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. Audio on linux is a complete joke, and I'm glad pipewire is there to tackle it.

CarVac 4y ago
I've experienced that same lack of synchronization with other people.
- Filligree 4y ago
  I can recommend Syncplay. For a variety of reasons, but it’ll also deal with desync.
  - CarVac 4y ago
    I don't think it works on Twitch...
sph 4y ago
If you haven't, post an issue on the Pipewire repo. I've found that the main author, Wim Taymans, is very proactive in fixing any issue if they're reproducible. I've opened two bugs, and two times he fixed them personally in less than a week, which is incredible for an open source project of that size.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  I've had the same experience. Had a couple issues and they ended up fixed in the next version.
mort96 4y ago
Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS but with a clock that's a bit less accurate than your computer's, so every now and then, you get a stutter as a video frame has to shown for 1 refresh interval longer or shorter than it should. What we could do instead is to calculate a fixed pattern to display frames. If your monitor is 30Hz and the video is 30 FPS, we show exactly one video frame for every monitor refresh. If your monitor is 60Hz and the video is 30 FPS, show each video frame for 2 monitor refreshes. If the monitor is 30Hz and the video is 60 FPS, skip every other video frame. This will already introduce some deviation from the "ideal" timing if your display clock isn't super accurate. And if the monitor is 59.94Hz, that's probably close enough to 60 that we want to show each frame of 30 FPS video exactly twice, but that means the video is playing at 99.9% of its intended speed. 10 seconds over 20 minutes is a surprisingly big gap though. Playing every frame of 30 FPS video twice on a 59.94Hz monitor would net a 1.2 second deviation over 20 minutes. EDIT: Why the downvotes? Everything here is correct according to my understanding of the situation after implementing video playback software and working with other people's. If anything is wrong, please correct me, don't just silently downvote.
- trifurcate 4y ago
  Excuse my ignorance, but don't monitors take their clock signal from the host? I would think that synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate is a mismatch to handle on the display end, not the host end where frames might get doubled or skipped (and eventually introduce long-term timing errors). This is assuming an 60Hz rate advertised by the monitor.
  - mort96 4y ago
    I don't know whether the clock is technically in the host machine or in the monitor, I imagine it depends on the type of connection. But the idea of a different "display clock" and "playback clock" still applies, since a program's own timekeeping based on usleep + gettimeofday will be different from the monitor clock, wherever that happens to reside. And unless you're using some kind of variable refresh rate, the monitor always, always refreshes on a fixed interval. It doesn't do any "synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate". But with VSync, you can synchronize your software with the display refreshes, which is how you can decide to draw every frame twice and that sort of stuff.
RedShift1 4y ago
I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Firefox can't do sound with raw ALSA. No, I know that doesn't explain why PulseAudio exists. But I think Pipewire can do more - isn't it supposed to be able to move video around as well as audio? Or something. I also just use raw ALSA. It's there anyway, it works, and I don't need more daemons (I don't need NetworkManager either).
- bluGill 4y ago
  Because the complexity of audio is hard. If you just have a desktop system with stereo speakers it is easy. However if you ever plug a set of headphones in things get hard. Should all sound now go through the headphones or not? Different people will want different answers (I have headphones plugged in all the time, but I'm not wearing them all the time, so if someone sends me an IM I need the beep to come out the regular speakers). There are monitors that have built in speakers making this harder, does the user have better speakers plugged into the computer output or not? That is the regular desktop user. If you do any for of audio processing (pod casting, music recording) you may have a large number of different inputs and output connected, and want to do mixing of some sort. Likewise if you do videos you may have more than one "webcam" that you want to mix. These are fairly common use cases (many people have a dream of being a musician or an actor, and so have this type of setup that they are trying to use in the efforts to make it big)
  - jancsika 4y ago
    > Should all sound now go through the headphones or not? The correct answer to that specific question: as a sane default, all sound should now go through the headphones. That's a sane default on the Iphone, probably on Macbooks, and it also happens to be the one that at least a stock Gnome or Ubuntu desktop chooses. In fact I have trouble thinking of a saner default than that one! Forgetting about sane defaults seems to be a common problem in FOSS communication. It's unfortunate, because describing something as unknowable can convince a new developer to avoid inspecting the code around that particular problem. E.g., it took a long time for Gnome to get the sane default I describe above. I'd bet that lurking in the appropriate mailing list history is at least one didactic post from an audio developer explaining how we can never truly know what a user's preferred setup could be.
calvinmorrison 4y ago
By the time pulse finally worked right! 2060: PipeWire11 is being deprecated and replaced with a compositing audio server named Weyband
spamatica 4y ago
Not to defend Pulse too hard but I use Linux every day and am specifically interested in audio and outside low latency work (where I use jack), Pulse has rarely been a problem since many many years. What exactly are the issues people experience?
- dsissitka 4y ago
  I regularly hit a couple. This one breaks audio and video in virtual machines: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/469 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/46... The effects of this one vary: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/merge_requests/450 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/merge_... For me it breaks audio in Chrome and VLC: https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/issues/1789 https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/issues/1789
  - spamatica 4y ago
    I guess I wasn't very clear. It was issues with Pulse I wanted to know more about. Low latency is obviously not it's forté, otherwise it just works, for me that is.
    - dsissitka 4y ago
      You were pretty clear. I just completely misread. :)
seba_dos1 4y ago
> That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. How is that "better than pulse ever did"? The only issue I had with PulseAudio on several machines in last decade or so was Bluetooth A2DP connection being very capricious. I have recently switched to PipeWire and it actually improved Bluetooth, but I had to disable Wireplumber's libcamera backend because it made it regularly eat 100% of RAM. No complaints after doing that. Crackling noises or desynchronized video playback would instantly take it into "unacceptable" territory. Sounds like you have severe issues with both PA and PW. Maybe your hardware is the problem?
- lazyier 4y ago
  I estimate about 75% chance it's a configuration problem on his end. The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up. This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature. This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire. The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot. Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up. Well, yeah, since when pulse showed up and started breaking people's audio it effectively replaced alsa (even though they kind of operate at different layers). So if you didn't like that, of course the solution was to rip out Poettering's bugfest and revert to alsa. Thankfully at some point pulse stabilized a lot and in my experience tends to just work out of the box these days, but people tend to have their habits set by the early versions that were pushed out before they were ready.
lucas_membrane 4y ago
>> Audio on linux is a complete joke Yes, for example, the zoom app is now one of the most widely relied on apps for connecting people over networks. To get its audio output to fairly represent the input (e.g. for musical content), the input client is supposed to use the 'original audio' setting. That setting is not yet available on the linux version of zoom. On the output end, the audio is a mess, sounding as if somewhere along the way a handshake has turned into a fistfight. Audio is complicated. Another example: an ordinary amateur, part-time, casual guitarist might nowadays play with thousands of dollars of pedals and processors plugged into his signal path. He gets this to work by plugging and unplugging those devices and their cables in various configurations until everything sounds best. Try providing that level of flexibility in software with reasonable default settings for all of the myriad of applications and environments in which one might try to apply computer audio.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
* Audio on Linux "used" to be a complete joke. Pipewire fixed that.
- lionkor 4y ago
  For me, its still a WIP than a full fix, but definitely better than pulse :)

CarVac 4y ago

I've experienced that same lack of synchronization with other people.

Filligree 4y ago
I can recommend Syncplay. For a variety of reasons, but it’ll also deal with desync.
- CarVac 4y ago
  I don't think it works on Twitch...

sph 4y ago

If you haven't, post an issue on the Pipewire repo. I've found that the main author, Wim Taymans, is very proactive in fixing any issue if they're reproducible. I've opened two bugs, and two times he fixed them personally in less than a week, which is incredible for an open source project of that size.

CameronNemo 4y ago
I've had the same experience. Had a couple issues and they ended up fixed in the next version.

mort96 4y ago

Video playback timing is actually pretty difficult, with only trade-offs, no "right" solution. The easiest solution is to use your computer's accurate clock to time the frames. This means, if your video is at 30 FPS, you will have gone through exactly 3000 frames after 100 seconds. But your monitor might not be refreshing at exactly 60 FPS, it might be targetting the 59.94 standard, or it might be targetting 60 FPS but with a clock that's a bit less accurate than your computer's, so every now and then, you get a stutter as a video frame has to shown for 1 refresh interval longer or shorter than it should. What we could do instead is to calculate a fixed pattern to display frames. If your monitor is 30Hz and the video is 30 FPS, we show exactly one video frame for every monitor refresh. If your monitor is 60Hz and the video is 30 FPS, show each video frame for 2 monitor refreshes. If the monitor is 30Hz and the video is 60 FPS, skip every other video frame. This will already introduce some deviation from the "ideal" timing if your display clock isn't super accurate. And if the monitor is 59.94Hz, that's probably close enough to 60 that we want to show each frame of 30 FPS video exactly twice, but that means the video is playing at 99.9% of its intended speed. 10 seconds over 20 minutes is a surprisingly big gap though. Playing every frame of 30 FPS video twice on a 59.94Hz monitor would net a 1.2 second deviation over 20 minutes. EDIT: Why the downvotes? Everything here is correct according to my understanding of the situation after implementing video playback software and working with other people's. If anything is wrong, please correct me, don't just silently downvote.

trifurcate 4y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but don't monitors take their clock signal from the host? I would think that synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate is a mismatch to handle on the display end, not the host end where frames might get doubled or skipped (and eventually introduce long-term timing errors). This is assuming an 60Hz rate advertised by the monitor.
- mort96 4y ago
  I don't know whether the clock is technically in the host machine or in the monitor, I imagine it depends on the type of connection. But the idea of a different "display clock" and "playback clock" still applies, since a program's own timekeeping based on usleep + gettimeofday will be different from the monitor clock, wherever that happens to reside. And unless you're using some kind of variable refresh rate, the monitor always, always refreshes on a fixed interval. It doesn't do any "synchronizing a stream of frames to the display refresh rate". But with VSync, you can synchronize your software with the display refreshes, which is how you can decide to draw every frame twice and that sort of stuff.

RedShift1 4y ago

I don't even know why this is even necessary. Back in the day I just set up the ALSA daemon to save/restore volume levels and that was it. In all programs I select ALSA as output and boom done. So I'm confused to why pulse audio and pipewire even exist.

denton-scratch 4y ago
Firefox can't do sound with raw ALSA. No, I know that doesn't explain why PulseAudio exists. But I think Pipewire can do more - isn't it supposed to be able to move video around as well as audio? Or something. I also just use raw ALSA. It's there anyway, it works, and I don't need more daemons (I don't need NetworkManager either).
bluGill 4y ago
Because the complexity of audio is hard. If you just have a desktop system with stereo speakers it is easy. However if you ever plug a set of headphones in things get hard. Should all sound now go through the headphones or not? Different people will want different answers (I have headphones plugged in all the time, but I'm not wearing them all the time, so if someone sends me an IM I need the beep to come out the regular speakers). There are monitors that have built in speakers making this harder, does the user have better speakers plugged into the computer output or not? That is the regular desktop user. If you do any for of audio processing (pod casting, music recording) you may have a large number of different inputs and output connected, and want to do mixing of some sort. Likewise if you do videos you may have more than one "webcam" that you want to mix. These are fairly common use cases (many people have a dream of being a musician or an actor, and so have this type of setup that they are trying to use in the efforts to make it big)
- jancsika 4y ago
  > Should all sound now go through the headphones or not? The correct answer to that specific question: as a sane default, all sound should now go through the headphones. That's a sane default on the Iphone, probably on Macbooks, and it also happens to be the one that at least a stock Gnome or Ubuntu desktop chooses. In fact I have trouble thinking of a saner default than that one! Forgetting about sane defaults seems to be a common problem in FOSS communication. It's unfortunate, because describing something as unknowable can convince a new developer to avoid inspecting the code around that particular problem. E.g., it took a long time for Gnome to get the sane default I describe above. I'd bet that lurking in the appropriate mailing list history is at least one didactic post from an audio developer explaining how we can never truly know what a user's preferred setup could be.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

By the time pulse finally worked right! 2060: PipeWire11 is being deprecated and replaced with a compositing audio server named Weyband

spamatica 4y ago

Not to defend Pulse too hard but I use Linux every day and am specifically interested in audio and outside low latency work (where I use jack), Pulse has rarely been a problem since many many years. What exactly are the issues people experience?

dsissitka 4y ago
I regularly hit a couple. This one breaks audio and video in virtual machines: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/469 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/46... The effects of this one vary: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/merge_requests/450 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/wireplumber/-/merge_... For me it breaks audio in Chrome and VLC: https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/issues/1789 https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects/issues/1789
- spamatica 4y ago
  I guess I wasn't very clear. It was issues with Pulse I wanted to know more about. Low latency is obviously not it's forté, otherwise it just works, for me that is.
  - dsissitka 4y ago
    You were pretty clear. I just completely misread. :)

seba_dos1 4y ago

> That said, I've had daily issues with it, from it slowing video playback (weirdly, by about 10 seconds over 20 minutes or so, only noticable when watching something synchronized with someone else), over crackling noises with speakers when no audio is playing, to straight up lags and skips every few seconds with certain devices. How is that "better than pulse ever did"? The only issue I had with PulseAudio on several machines in last decade or so was Bluetooth A2DP connection being very capricious. I have recently switched to PipeWire and it actually improved Bluetooth, but I had to disable Wireplumber's libcamera backend because it made it regularly eat 100% of RAM. No complaints after doing that. Crackling noises or desynchronized video playback would instantly take it into "unacceptable" territory. Sounds like you have severe issues with both PA and PW. Maybe your hardware is the problem?

lazyier 4y ago
I estimate about 75% chance it's a configuration problem on his end. The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up. This means trying to configure dmix to work properly, trying to configure your audio outputs with tools like 'alsamixer' and things of that nature. This is about a 100% guaranteed approach to screwing up audio in Linux. For years it is what unsuspecting newbies were told by "really smart people" on the internet when faced when any sort of audio issue and all it really does is ensure that their OS audio is going to turn into a dumpster fire. The only way to fix it is to aggressively find your "custom" audio settings for every application, find all the alsa configuration files and delete them. And then find out where your distribution saves your alsa mixer settings between reboots and link them to /dev/null and reboot. Audio settings of this nature are very persistent and nothing Pulseaudio or Pipewire can do to help you fix it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > The "I hate Pulse Audio and especially Lennart" crowd tends to want to either go back to "Alsa" or tried at some point to install the old OSS drivers and then gave up. Well, yeah, since when pulse showed up and started breaking people's audio it effectively replaced alsa (even though they kind of operate at different layers). So if you didn't like that, of course the solution was to rip out Poettering's bugfest and revert to alsa. Thankfully at some point pulse stabilized a lot and in my experience tends to just work out of the box these days, but people tend to have their habits set by the early versions that were pushed out before they were ready.

lucas_membrane 4y ago

>> Audio on linux is a complete joke Yes, for example, the zoom app is now one of the most widely relied on apps for connecting people over networks. To get its audio output to fairly represent the input (e.g. for musical content), the input client is supposed to use the 'original audio' setting. That setting is not yet available on the linux version of zoom. On the output end, the audio is a mess, sounding as if somewhere along the way a handshake has turned into a fistfight. Audio is complicated. Another example: an ordinary amateur, part-time, casual guitarist might nowadays play with thousands of dollars of pedals and processors plugged into his signal path. He gets this to work by plugging and unplugging those devices and their cables in various configurations until everything sounds best. Try providing that level of flexibility in software with reasonable default settings for all of the myriad of applications and environments in which one might try to apply computer audio.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

* Audio on Linux "used" to be a complete joke. Pipewire fixed that.

lionkor 4y ago
For me, its still a WIP than a full fix, but definitely better than pulse :)