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PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

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Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#2
I recently made the switch in NixOS and found it pretty painless. Can't get my mic to work in Firefox though, and the other day I was looking through the manual trying to figure out how to use my HDMI screen's speakers rather than the built-in one and couldn't find the right incantation. Sounds like such rough corner cases will be a thing of the past soon. Congrats to the dev team!

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#3
post #2

I recently made the switch in NixOS and found it pretty painless. Can't get my mic to work in Firefox though, and the other day I was looking through the manual trying to figure out how to use my HDMI screen's speakers rather than the built-in one and couldn't find the right incantation. Sounds like such rough corner cases will be a thing of the past soon. Congrats to the dev team!

You can still use pavucontrol for configuring in- and output devices per application.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#5
post #3
post #2

I recently made the switch in NixOS and found it pretty painless. Can't get my mic to work in Firefox though, and the other day I was looking through the manual trying to figure out how to use my HDMI screen's speakers rather than the built-in one and couldn't find the right incantation. Sounds like such rough corner cases will be a thing of the past soon. Congrats to the dev team!

You can still use pavucontrol for configuring in- and output devices per application.

That is how I have to manage the target output when Pipewire doesn't switch the audio to my Bluetooth headphones upon connection (sometimes it does). The confusing part is that the selected/target output in Settings->Sound on Pop!_OS continues to show as the headphones but the sound from the application, say Firefox, doesn't switch to that (clicking on Test works perfectly which is when I realized that the issue probably was not with Bluetooth/headphones but about per-app switching and tried pavucontrol which confirmed the doubts by showing Firefox output still going to analog stereo).

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#8
I have been impressed how I've been able to make arbitrarily complex audio graphs in QJackCtl and it just works. I can even activate patch bays and it forces the audio configuration and applications (even browsers) stay happy.

It's impressive how it manages to support connections that require reclocking and do the needed large ratio resampling needed behind the scenes, something that PulseAudio was never really able to do. It's also nice for monitoring while streaming and seems to have much lower latency than OBS's monitoring.

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#9
post #7

I'm using pipewire and pipewire-pulse in void linux, and everything works perfectly.

Do Bluetooth devices also work perfectly?

For me, BT works perfectly with PulseAudio. PipeWire is very satisfying for absolutely everything else, but BT devices just refuse to connect (and I'm inept at debugging BT issues).

Re: PipeWire: A year in review and a look ahead

#10

In my experience, switching to WirePlumber fixed the few problems I had originally had with the default session manager.

Wireplumber looks very capable to me, although I think the documentation could be better, especially there could be more examples for more advanced configuration.

One thing I still fight with is pw-loopback. I like to create a default sink that I can remap to my sound card. Playing a simple sine over that will give me hickups and dropouts. There is nothing in the documentation of pw-loopback that tells you any about this and as of now I could not resolve it.

When I plug the same output directly into the soundcard in Catia, the sound issues are gone.

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