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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

#41
post #22
post #12

Can anyone explain me like I'm five, why this major transition from PulseAudio to PipeWire is happening during the last year?

There are some things PipeWire makes a lot easier to do. For example, I have an electric piano that I can connect to my computer and play. I had to install a special software called "jack", because PulseAudio would have me wait before I could hear a note I played. Jack was not simple to use, but even if you were good at it, there were problems. Imagine you wanted to play along with some music. Well, bad luck, some so…

> and you can't use it together with PulseAudio

You absolutely can, PA is then present in JACK (and JACK in PA) as a single sink/source that you can route like any other app - so not as flexible as PipeWire, but not as problematic as you paint it either.

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

#42

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.

Tangentially related to your use case but check out https://moodeaudio.org/

Got it running on a Pi+DAC & use spotify connect mostly, but occasionally throw stuff from my NAS on to it.

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

#43

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.

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 alt…

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

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

#44
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some things PipeWire makes a lot easier to do. For example, I have an electric piano that I can connect to my computer and play. I had to install a special software called "jack", because PulseAudio would have me wait before I could hear a note I played. Jack was not simple to use, but even if you were good at it, there were problems. Imagine you wanted to play along with some music. Well, bad luck, some so…

> and you can't use it together with PulseAudio You absolutely can, PA is then present in JACK (and JACK in PA) as a single sink/source that you can route like any other app - so not as flexible as PipeWire, but not as problematic as you paint it either.

Yeah, but in practice I never managed to get that work consistently.

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

#46

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.

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/

I'm also curious about using PW, I upgraded, but I haven't setup any streaming yet.

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

#47
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you can't use it together with PulseAudio You absolutely can, PA is then present in JACK (and JACK in PA) as a single sink/source that you can route like any other app - so not as flexible as PipeWire, but not as problematic as you paint it either.

Yeah, but in practice I never managed to get that work consistently.

Works really well for me for jamming with Jamulus ;)

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

#48

Still facing several bugs in pipewire/wireplumber on Alpine. Not entirely sure if I missed some configuration (it's a bit confusing) or just buggy, though I've def seen some other user reports with the same bugs as me. Probably going back to pulse to get working audio/bluetooth again. Linux is a real trip, man. Bluetooth was introduced 24 years ago and we can still barely make it work. Seems to work on Windows, Andro…

Never encountered a platform that didn't gave me problems with Bluetooth, honestly. Maybe on other platforms things are a little bit smoother but also with inferior troubleshooting.

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

#49
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and you can't use it together with PulseAudio You absolutely can, PA is then present in JACK (and JACK in PA) as a single sink/source that you can route like any other app - so not as flexible as PipeWire, but not as problematic as you paint it either.

Yeah, but in practice I never managed to get that work consistently.

Same

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

#50
post #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…

Note that qjackctl's author has made qpwgraph which is a similar tool but tailored to pipewire, it works great (and is already available in e.g. ArchLinux AUR, or here otherwise: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/rncbc/qpwgraph )
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