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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

#51
post #26

I'm not a pro user but PipeWire has been mostly great. I originally switched because of PulseAudio was causing a hissing noise on with my bluetooth headset, and switching fixed it. However, there are still two issues that I'm struggling with and haven't been able to find a definitive answer for. One is the audio sometimes randomly jitters while simply playing music. It seems this only happens when I use my bluetooth…

You are definitely not the only one was has the issue about the automatic switching to bluetooth headset. One workaround is to run `pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect` (not persisted across reboot) as recommended on the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sound_does_not_aut...

meta comment: I find it's almost always worth checking the arch linux wiki for any software you're using (either as a guide or if you're having issues).

It's one of the best resources out there, though obviously if you're not running arch you'll need to tweak things from the suggestions.

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

#53
post #27

Some more anecdata, I switched to pipewire when I bought my new laptop and it was great. I was struggling to get pulseaudio working properly, switched to pipewire and installed pipewire-pulse[0] from the arch packages, and stuff "just worked". It's one of the only times in recent memory that moving over to 'the new thing' actually worked without significant pain. https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/pipewire-p…

I actually did have a few issues and things to tweak when I switched (I think I did it fairly early) but after some initial setup everything started working perfectly.

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

#56
post #45

Most pipewire users here seem to be arch users with access to bleeding edge releases. But how does PW work for, say, Debian/Ubuntu users?

Debian unstable user here (and also Gentoo on a different PC) - I've removed PulseAudio for a couple of months now, and everything works nicely (including a Bluetooth headset and HDMI audio out) with PipeWire and WirePlumber - the only hiccup was an old manual configuration I had for ALSA to use PulseAudio as default audio sink, which needed to be removed.

I haven't tested Jack compatibility yet.

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

#57
post #12

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

I think the main reason for the sudden uptick in Pipewire usage is that due to the pandemic a lot more people were doing daily video meetings with screen sharing. And for all people that have migrated to Wayland, this was a major source of pain.

With pipewire, this works quite nicely, including for applications that are sandboxed (e.g. Jitsi in a Flatpak). In my bubble, when people talked about using Pipewire, it was almost exclusively related to screensharing on Wayland.

I've switched from Pulseaudio to Pulseaudio-on-Pipewire last year and haven't looked back. Next step would be trying to set an audio processing pipeline with audio effects (like a multiband equalizer tuned to my headphones), something that I managed to set up with Jack before using Pipewire, but that was always a pain.

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

#58
post #45

Most pipewire users here seem to be arch users with access to bleeding edge releases. But how does PW work for, say, Debian/Ubuntu users?

Works great on debian bookworm as a full replacement for jack and pulseaudio.

Read the debian wiki for the setup.

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

#59
post #45

Most pipewire users here seem to be arch users with access to bleeding edge releases. But how does PW work for, say, Debian/Ubuntu users?

I use it together with wireplumber on three systems, all running bookworm. One old MacBook Air, a fairly new ThinkPad and a run-of-the-mill desktop PC. Works flawlessly on all of them. I have no custom configuration, all default what comes from the packages.

For the laptops I also use BT headphones, and with the ThinkPad I use a headset that with the latest wireplumber switching profiles just work whenever I join a meeting with Slack or Teams (both in Google Chrome).

For the desktop PC I had a use case I never got working properly, or at least easily, with PA. That is to expose all the HDMI outputs of the graphics card as separate sinks. With PW, just switch over to the Pro profile and they all appear. Then I can route what ever stream/application I want to a specific HDMI output.

Additionally, I use USB MIDI devices and a software synth, qsynth, using JACK. Setting up both MIDI and audio routing via qjackctl is so convenient.

Oh, and USB audio devices also work without a problem. Can't say if that is different from PA as I never used them much before.

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